In the Face of the Climate Crisis: What Is Your Circular Innovation Strategy?

Today, more than ever, organizations must adapt their operations and offerings to meet the expectations of increasingly conscious customers. This is not only vital for business resilience but also essential for the health of the planet.

Climate change, inequality, and pollution are not isolated challenges — they are symptoms of systemic design failures. For centuries, solutions and systems have been created without accounting for their impact on people and the environment. Millions live with the daily consequences of these oversights. In response, consumers are rethinking the value they seek in the products and services they consume.

Organizations that want to thrive in this new reality must evolve. Their ability to act boldly will define our shared future, one where business success is measured not only in profit but also in resilience, adaptability, and responsibility.

Circular innovation offers a pathway forward — a strategy to lead in uncertain times by designing solutions that balance stability, long-term business success, and ecological health. This approach unlocks opportunities for new business models, deeper customer and supplier relationships, and fresh revenue streams.

The Strategic Power of Design

Designers bring a unique strength to this challenge: the ability to think holistically. They see systemic relationships, identify points of intervention, and create opportunities that align business outcomes with societal and ecological well-being.

By generating multiple possible solutions and making them tangible, designers empower organizations to test assumptions, evaluate alternatives, and make informed decisions that benefit both business and ecosystem.

A New Paradigm: The Circular Economy

The circular economy provides a framework for moving beyond the outdated linear model of take–make–waste. Instead of endless production and disposal, it emphasizes minimizing impact and maximizing value.

To think circularly is to design products, services, and systems around principles of repair, reuse, and recycling. It is about closing the resource loop — transforming waste into opportunity and building a more sustainable, resilient economy.

Defining Circular Innovation

Circular innovation combines the strategic power of design with the principles of circularity to create solutions at the right scale — grounded in user needs and systemic realities.

It ensures organizational relevance, strengthens competitive positioning, and prepares businesses to lead in the climate age. In essence, circular innovation is both a sustainability strategy and a growth strategy.

Combining the strategic power of design with the intent to transform businesses in a direction aligned with customer values and environmental concerns is a clear competitive advantage.

Organizations adopting these strategies can:

• Reduce environmental impact

• Increase operational efficiency

• Strengthen customer loyalty

• Comply with regulatory requirements

Regardless of industry or size, every organization can integrate circular innovation into its operations. And the most successful ones will combine multiple strategies to generate unique advantages.

Three Categories of Circular Innovation Strategies

Drawing from Larry Keeley and Doblin’s 10 Types of Innovation framework, circular innovation strategies can be grouped into three categories:

• Configuration – How the organization is structured to create and capture value. This includes rethinking business models, supply chains, processes, or partnerships to support circularity.

• Offering – The products themselves. Here, the focus is on designing goods that are easy to repair, reuse, or recycle, extending their lifecycle and reducing waste.

• Experience – The customer journey. This involves creating intuitive, seamless, and rewarding experiences around circular products and services, making sustainable choices both accessible and attractive.

How to Get Started

Organizations seeking to implement circular innovation should begin with an honest assessment of their configuration, offering, and experience, considering both social and environmental impacts.

From there:

1. Identify opportunity areas aligned with your budget and capabilities.

2. Apply a design approach to test critical assumptions through rapid prototyping and experimentation.

3. Engage stakeholders — customers, suppliers, employees, and even non-users — to validate desirability, feasibility, and viability.

4. Iterate and refine based on insights.

5. Build a roadmap to guide both short-term wins and long-term transformation.

In the next articles in this series, I will dive deeper into each of the three categories — Configuration, Offering, and Experience — and share examples of how organizations are blending human-centered design with circular economy principles to build competitive advantage and shape a more promising future.