Circular business model implementation in practice: Learnings from the case of electric vehicle batteries

Session
WE.3.A || Business Models for a Circular Economy

Authors
Schulz-Mönninghoff, Magnus; Bey, Niki; Niero, Monia

Abstract
Circular business models (CBM) have evolved as a key concept for implementing a circular economy, but often suffer from slow adoption in industry. Despite ongoing efforts in scientific research to explore the underlying drivers and barriers conceptually, experience shows how companies need to go through a lengthy process of acquiring in-depth knowledge and overcoming case-specific issues before being able to capture sustainable business value from CBM. As a reflection of this process, the authors present key learnings on implementing different CBM for electric vehicle batteries based on a three-year industrial PhD research project. The goal is to provide some practical guidance on how to deal with commonly encountered obstacles in a circular economy such as data availability, sector collaboration and regulatory uncertainty, and to inspire ways of accelerating CBM adoption in automotive industry in the future.