Collaboration in Circular Oriented Innovation: Why, How and What?

Our society faces many global sustainability challenges. Many of these challenges we have either created or exacerbated by not thinking about how the scale of our actions impacts the planet. We have however entered the Anthropocene, an epoch in time whereby human activity is now the dominant force upon the planet’s climate and environment. It is abundantly clear that our actions, if not changed, will result in the collapse of many crucial life support systems that will affect our society. A key contributing reason for why our current actions are unsustainable and are ultimately creating negative impacts on the planet is how we produce, use and consume products and services. This highlights that resource flows are out of balance with ecological systems. The way we have structured our economy simply does not account for the finite and limited nature of resources or the ecological systems capacity to renew resource stocks. It is clear we need to change how our production, consumption and economic system functions, especially if we are to avoid the worst or reverse anthropogenic impacts. This requires creativity and the operationalisation of new ideas to come up with new ways of doing things. In another word, it requires us to innovate. But, to do so with increasing sustainable impacts as the key driver and rationale for innovation activities. The role of innovation for stimulating and creating sustainable change is widely recognised in academia and practice. Both see that we need to increasingly pursue collaborative innovations that take a systemic perspective to mitigate or solve the sustainability challenges we have created.