Framing the Managerial Practices for Circular Economy Business Models: A Case Study Analysis

Circular economy has become a hot topic for scholars and practitioners as it represents a new industrial paradigm for waste generation, resource scarcity and sustainable economic growth that aims to overcome open systems paradigms, based on the traditional make, take, and disposal process. Whereas this issue has posed a lot of attention to the policies of circular economy as guidelines for policymakers, we still lack of consolidated managerial directions that support companies to implement this paradigm. In other words, although several scientific contributions started to shift the attention from macro (policies) to micro (company) levels of analysis, the issue of which managerial practices companies have to adopt for circular economy implementation still deserves particular attention. Although this literature gap continues persisting, several scholars have opened up the research stream of circular economy business models, which tries to analyze the business model design choices in the light of circular economy principles. Accordingly, we revise the main scientific contributions that analyze the managerial practices for circular economy business models. In doing so, we propose in a comprehensive theoretical framework a map of the managerial practices for circular economy business models that can be adopted at two different business model dimensions, i.e., the value network and the customer value proposition and interface. Therefore, we will test the suitability of our framework on a small medium Italian company operating in office supply industry for 23 years, by looking into the managerial practices that this company has implemented.