Now that you are convinced, and even excited about going circular, we have some valuable tips for you. A circular strategy approach can be built in 3 steps. First, identify the opportunities for your business.
The benefits must be clear and convincing for your management to follow you. Their support will give your initiative the greatest chance of success. Circularity implies organizational changes that impact offers, production, purchasing and distribution processes, jobs, and business models.
To be accepted, these changes must be legitimized internally. So, what arguments should we put forward? Well, beyond the environmental motivations, there is the security of critical material supply.
Especially in the face of material shortages or rising prices. Another argument is differentiating your offers thanks to the innovation that the circular approach will generate. Typically, business models based on selling the use of products will differentiate you from your competitors.
Example: Philips sells some customers a lighting service rather than bulbs. After convincing your management, the next step is to experiment! For this, start small.
Success on a small scale will let you convince them to go further later. And experimenting is also an opportunity to learn a lot. And for that, you can use the agile method.
In the agile method, the innovation process is reversed compared to the traditional method. Here, we don’t wait until the end of the project to hear the opinions of potential clients. Throughout the process, a prototype is regularly tested and changes are made resulting from feedback from the customers.
It works through iterations. . .
Each advance feeds the next. The potential pitfalls are quickly identified, which minimizes the risk of being out of step with requirements. Another tip: adopt the intrapreneur mindset.
This means acting like an entrepreneur, but within your company. You will have to convince, argue, and appeal to a wide variety of internal partners, and especially to those who decide on investments. It is about demonstrating the value created by your project and sparking a collective challenge.
That’s it for the first two steps: identifying and experimenting. If everything has gone well so far, you go to step 3: deploying. Once the viability of your project has been demonstrated.
. . It’s time to roll it out on a larger scale.
On a larger scale from a geographical point of view, or from a commercial point of view, meaning to extend it to several of your offers. But when you change scale appears a wider question of company transformation and therefore of driving change. In this case, the linear model is so anchored in our way of producing and selling that this kind of change induces resistance that can be very powerful.
How can these barriers be removed? Let’s ask an expert in the field: Raphaël Masvigner, the co-founder of the company Circul’R. Hello, Raphaël!
Your job is to support companies that wish to implement circular strategies. What do you consider to be the key factors for the deployment of circular models? The most important first thing is training colleagues in the circular economy through awareness-raising activities such as conferences, but also through business training so that everyone knows how they can promote the circular economy within their company.
The second advice is to have a clear roadmap on the circular economy. And how do you get it? By making a diagnosis of these activities.
What are we doing in terms of the circular economy today? Are there holes in the net? Benchmark what competitors are doing and, from there, define the priority lines of action to implement a circular strategy.
It is particularly important to link a company’s decarbonization strategy with the circular economy. Indeed, once you have done your carbon assessment, the circular economy will allow you to implement solutions to reduce your CO2 emissions. The third key point is to test.
The circular economy is a relatively new model. We need to explore it, and therefore do some testing. And this involves working with charities, startups, and the circular economy itself to see how it works, and potentially learn from our mistakes.
Any other tips to share? Another tip is how to measure the implementation of these circular projects and their associated impacts. Today, we don't have many tools to do this, unlike the carbon footprint for measuring carbon emissions, so it is still very complex to measure the circularity of these projects.
Nevertheless, we have some tools like the life cycle analysis, but we can also define different indicators like the amount of waste avoided, or the resources saved. Some companies, such as Decathlon, are innovating and defining new indicators, such as circular sales. Five percent of their turnover today is circular, which they want to bring to 15% by 2026.
The last point I would like to share with you is working in an ecosystem. It means surrounding ourselves with the right stakeholders to accelerate our way to a circular economy. And that can be done at two levels, either by aligning with startups or charities or by mobilizing your entire value chain to scale up circular solutions.
Thank you, Raphaël, for all this information! With all these tips, we hope you can see more clearly how you can act. Now, it’s your turn!
