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Businesses like Airbnb have shown that a successful circular economy (CE) business can operate exclusively online. Although online communication and web appearance attributes have been subject to academic research given accelerated digitization, there is still a lack of knowledge about online attributes and their role in facilitating CE. We close the portrayed knowledge gap by conducting a discrete-choice experiment with best to worst scaling and focusing on the effect of CE experience on the perception of a CE website by ranking nine online attributes, grouped in three subsets. We therefore contribute by identifying online attributes that are perceived as favorable for CE businesses and detect how participation in CE activities affects the perception of these attributes. We find that third-party associated online attributes (e.g., user reviews or third-party guarantees) rank significantly higher throughout CE consumption patterns of the sample, being always amongst the top three attributes. This novel finding on online preferences opens a new direction for further research, as well as allows practitioners to optimize online operations accordingly. Furthermore, we find that users without prior touchpoints with CE have a higher need for information about the business model as compared to CE active users who are more interested in community related attributes.

Technological distance is one important factor within research projects to enhance or prevent successful knowledge transfer for innovation. To get a better understanding of bridging mechanisms of diverging technological distances, we compare publication-based and individually perceived technological distances of collaboration partners in a multi-disciplinary battery research project. Differences hint at already bridged or non-bridged technological distances. Further information, given during expert interviews, present reasons for different knowledge transfer and recombination mechanisms in different dyadic collaborations. We generally find evidence that technological distance can be bridged by reducing geographical or social distances. When research activities are really complementary and collaboration partners have a common (technical) language, there is less need of decreasing other distances. Integrating research along the traditional battery value chain needs more social or geographical proximity to decrease and not just bridge technological distance at least in a practical way.