Executive Breakfast Briefing: Circular Economy

We recently organised the third Executive Breakfast Briefing in collaboration with Bain & Company, focusing on circularity.

The event covered the following topics:

1. Circular Economy for Growth: How circular practices cut emissions, boost GDP, and offer new business opportunities.

2. Circularity Urgency: The ongoing circular disruption and global policy priorities.

3. Business Success Priorities: Key strategies for identifying waste, unlocking product value, targeting service-led growth, and building winning capabilities.

The breakout discussions centered around 3 questions - here we summarize the main points:

Question 1: What observations have been made regarding circularity?

Circularity initiatives involve standardizing hardware, promoting re-use in construction, fostering new business models, and encouraging innovation to optimize economic constraints and address material scarcity in the supply chain, emphasizing design thinking and cradle-to-cradle principles.

Question 2: What are the challenges associated with achieving circularity?

Challenges include personal boundaries, valuation discrepancies, leasing frequency issues, labor cost considerations, and the delicate balance between circularity and potential cannibalization. Additionally, there is a lack of comprehensive solutions for collection, recycling, standardization, and certification, which increases costs and necessitates a paradigm shift throughout the supply chain.

Question 3: What role do Board members play in advancing circularity efforts?

Board members play a crucial role by advocating for circularity solutions, ensuring alignment within the organization, urging policy changes, investing in research and development, encouraging risk-taking, facilitating stakeholder engagement, promoting design thinking, and prioritizing materiality assessments to drive value creation.

Couldn't make the event but interested to learn more about the topic?

Here are some recommended resources:

• The future is circular: How companies can prepare to grow in a changing world

• Whitepaper with WEF: Circular Transformation of Industries - Unlocking New Value in a Resource Constrained World (Jan 2023) (link to pdf)

• Whitepaper with WEF: Circular Transformation of Industries - The role of partnerships (Jan 2024) (link to pdf)

We thank the Bain & Company team for their support and excellent insights shared throughout this event and all previous Breakfast Briefing sessions. Stay tuned for the next edition!

Some pictures from the event: