Background

Circular economy is key to decarbonization

In Japan and around the world, transitions to decarbonized societies for the year 2050 are accelerating. For businesses, how to advance decarbonization of their products and services is an urgent matter. One of the keys to achieving this is to shift towards circular business models, which are expected to create synergies between carbon emission reduction and circular business transformation. Taking steps to implement the circular economy concept can also lead to increasing the competitiveness of a company.

The client requested us to consult on how they can start to adopt circular economy principles into their business.

Our Approach

Researching on leading examples in mobility industries outside Japan

We first collected information on products and services that integrate the ideas of circular economy among mobility industries outside Japan. We compiled more than 20 such examples from diverse regions including Europe, the US, Asia and Africa. By analyzing them based on our analysis framework, we studied the cases from the perspectives of value creation and business model construction.

Outcome

Extracting insights from diverse examples to reflect them on the client’s business framework

It is useful to examine leading examples in other countries when adopting the principles of circular economy to your own business development and sales strategies.
Let’s think together about how you can build a business framework to introduce the circular economy around us.

Photo by Alejandro Escamilla via Unsplash

Identifying key stakeholders and engaging with them through meeting, dialogue, or questionnaires allows a corporation to clarify the social issues it should address as top priorities and potential risks to its business.

EcoNetworks conducted a survey for a global manufacturer to solicit the opinions of a variety of stakeholders worldwide.

Targeted stakeholders included consumers, civil society organizations, researchers, government officials, investors, and suppliers with a high interest in social issues and knowledge about CSR. Leveraging our broad network, we took into account a balance of social status and age, as well as location in Europe, the US, and Asia, where the company operates, to find respondents. This helped bring out differences in the interest and focus that people with different backgrounds have.

In the questionnaire, we requested that respondents read the company’s latest CSR report, and asked for feedback about its current priority issues, activities, and future outlook. The results in our summary clearly show what types of issues and activities stakeholders see as important and expect the company to address. This provided valuable input for the company to consider their CSR initiatives going forward.

Developing sustainability strategies and KPIs in light of industry best practices ― EcoNetworks is here to accommodate such a request for corporations that seek quick and effective benchmarking.

In this project, we supported an energy company in collecting 30 companies’ cases worldwide.

The major dimensions we examined were how benchmark companies plotted sustainability strategies, clarified priority issues, set boundaries, determined KPIs, and disclosed their management approach. Trends observed through benchmarking were analyzed and compiled in a report, which provided useful insights for the company.