The “born-circular” are companies designed for circular economy business models and have brought circularity into all the steps of product life and usage cycles.
Just as “born-digital” companies have disrupted incumbents stuck in their bricks-and-mortar legacy, we will see born-circular quickly erode the market position of traditional businesses stuck in their linear-economy legacy.
To remain competitive in the 2030s, in which the circular economy will be the only economy, incumbents must start adopting circular-economy business models.
Historically, we have seen many leading companies failing to observe how new, superior business models were changing the competitive landscape, and failing to adapt in time to prosper.
(Carr, 2003) describes how smart manufacturers at the end of the nineteenth century saw that one of the great advantages of electric power was that it could be brought directly to workstations. They wired their plants and installed electric motors in their machines and gained an efficiency advantage over their slower-moving competitors. A similar understanding of the advantages of railways over steamships on rivers created mass-production sites and crushed the small, local plants that had dominated manufacturing up to that point.
Today, the emergence of digital business models challenges many incumbents, as they have difficulty in transforming their bricks-andmortar legacy and so find themselves with a new, digital-born industry leader (Close, Grebe, Schuuring, Rehberg, & Leybold, 2020).
THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY - THE NEXT SUPERIOR BUSINESS MODEL
In today’s linear economy, raw materials are extracted from resource-rich countries, transported to manufacturers, and processed into products. The finished goods then get shipped - often a great distance - to where they are used, discarded
