Circular business models in selected geographical contexts

The circular economy has been proposed as an answer to the call for decoupling economic growth from resource extraction, waste generation, and climate-change issues. Companies should thus implement circular business models, leveraging such strategies as product redesign, servitisation, or supply chain management. While their role has been addressed by previous literature, enabling factors such as government intervention or user engagement have received limited attention. This becomes more relevant since geographical contexts affect how these factors enable the circular economy. Thus, this chapter aims to explore the role of geographical contexts on the enabling factors of circular business models. Two case companies that have run circular business models in two different geographical settings (the Netherlands and Italy) are investigated. Users played a major role in both cases, even though their behaviour differs significantly. This can be explained by the geographical context in which the cases are located. In Northern Europe, citizens are less reluctant to adopt circular business models focused on servitisation, while, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no attempts to introduce similar solutions have happened in Italy. This chapter also emphasises the critical role that national government plays in enabling (or unintentionally delaying) the introduction of circular business models.