Supporting innovations

To facilitate the circular transition, we need new supporting innovations. These innovations help ensure that you can actually realize your proposition. They include technological innovations as well as process and societal innovations. These are supporting innovations. Inventions or innovations that enable the large-scale application of circular products and services. Think, for example, of 3D printing, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and The Internet of Things. True gamechangers that allow you to monitor and preserve the value of products and materials throughout all life phases.

Supporting innovations are obviously being developed for broader applications than circular design. This is a wide-ranging field and opinions probably differ on what does and does not fall within it. But there is no question that the deployment of these kinds of breakthrough technologies and methodologies is indispensable in the transition to a circular economy. For example, they reduce costs, automate work, align roles and timelines and create economic value. And thus they increase the likelihood of successful realization of the transition.