Vision

Commercial viability

No circular innovation can last or scale without a profitable business model and a strong fit with its markets, existing or future.

 

Local embeddedness

The success of a circular innovation depends on its links with its environment, a condition of its durable adoption by buyers, but also by ecosystems more broadly.

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An ecosystemic view of innovation…

Every productive industry belongs to a wider techno-economic system*: no economic branch exists in isolation from the others. Innovations and skills can travel along a single value chain and be taken up in others. Optimising these transfers, in number and in quality, is the great challenge of economic development, but also of strengthening any circular economy value chain or initiative.

 

…and of the green-digital transition

The latter is largely driven by technical change and by the adaptation of skills across every field, with transfers between companies or economic branches again playing a major part. This aspect is central to our analyses, which consider how an innovation can both benefit from the transition and accelerate it.

 

Durability of economic benefits

Local economic development is a structural endeavour: immediate benefits, critical as they are, must also last over time and yield new positive effects. We analyse in depth the drivers of economic durability: innovation capacities, skills creation and diffusion, ecosystems vitality (cf. ‘Local economic development’).

 

Building only on what is there

Any economic development and innovation strategy is inseparable from local specificities and existing capacities (firms, industries, skills), which are to be grown and diversified.

 

* Put forward by Geels, Dosi, and even Freeman, techno-economic systems shed a sharp light on today’s major techno-economic shifts.