The ‘need for speed’: Towards circular disruption—What it is, how to make it happen and how to know it's happening

Abstract

The environmental, social and economic limits and shortcomings of the current linear model of production and consumption highlight the necessity of a rapid transition towards a sustainable paradigm. The concept of a circular economy has recently gained traction among scholars, policy‐makers and businesses as a promising alternative. Yet our understanding of how to speed up the systemic transition from a linear economy paradigm towards a circular economy paradigm is lacking. In this paper, we address this research gap by introducing the concept of ‘circular disruption’ and by describing how such a disruption may unfold. To do so, we build on S‐curve thinking and the concept of panarchy. Based on the resulting synthesis, we propose three phases that constitute the core of the disruption process: (1) the release phase, (2) the reorganisation phase and (3) the eruption phase. We then operationalise these three phases for different enabling innovation system functions and illustrate our observations with examples for the textile and fashion sector. We discuss how each of the three disruption phases can be accelerated to quickly create an opening for the new circular paradigm. The proposed circular disruption framework offers novel insights on socio‐technical transitions and changes and contributes to strengthening a systemic and theoretically grounded approach to circular economy research. Scholars and practitioners alike may take advantage of this work to focus circular economy efforts on speed and scale—an urgently needed focus to start tackling the sustainability challenges humankind is currently facing.

Circular disruption: Concepts, enablers and ways ahead

“…The research is mainly centred on the idea that government must align societal stakeholders, in particular businesses, on a common circular disruption mission, and then orchestrate the journey towards this mission. Just as Bauwens et al (2022), the work highlights the need of government‐business‐civil society/community alliances to advance sustainability and systemic change. This systemic change including guidance provided on it is also the starting point for the research work conducted by Blomsma (2022).…”

“…The second paper of this special issue builds on Bauwens et al (2022). In this paper, Reike et al (2022) introduce the notion of missions, inspired by Mazzucato (2016Mazzucato ( , 2018Mazzucato ( , 2021 2022) provide a case study on policy entrepreneurship-the very first case study, as far as we are aware, that introduces the policy entrepreneurship concept into the CE literature.…”

Making sense of circular economy: Understanding the progression from idea to action

“…This lack of application of structured approaches in practice—to complexity, to circular strategies and to value network development—may have contributed to the difficulties that were experienced in progressing the proposed solutions and risk resulting in incremental change or ‘muddling through’ (Lindblom, 1959). This risks that CE will not achieve its transformative potential (Bauwens et al, 2022; Clube & Tennant, 2020), and we therefore call for organisation scholarship that focuses on enabling systemic change through COI.…”

Circular disruption: Digitalisation as a driver of circular economy business models

“…This is particularly relevant in the context of the circular economy, with its often‐cited aspiration to accelerate the transition to a more sustainable economic system by replacing the linear economy eventually (EMF, 2012; Webster, 2017). Bauwens et al (2022)) offer a concept of circular disruption with five key components as ‘A transformation in a socio‐technical system which causes the systematic, widespread, and fast change from the harmful “take‐make‐use‐dispose” model to a socially and environmentally desirable and sustainable model that reduces resource consumption and address structural waste through the deployment of circular strategies’. In this research, we define circular disruption as the supersession of a successful linear business model with a circular economy‐based approach in considerable parts of the market .…”