How collaboration helps companies develop circular-economy products

Cross-functional collaboration and customer-focused design thinking can help companies reap more value from the energy and resources they use.

ver the past 150 years, companies have steadily refined their ability to invent products and produce them efficiently, delivering a wide range of goods to consumers and improving financial returns to shareholders. In other respects, however, this system is far from optimal. Specifically, companies have hardly begun to reckon with the waste that occurs after products are purchased. When a consumer uses a product infrequently or discards it because it has worn out, at least some of the energy and material that went into making the product has been wasted.

Things don’t have to be this way. Some businesses are using circular-economy principles to create products that are durable, easy to reuse or recycle—and profitable. Nothing about this is easy, but two tactics can help.

The first is devising a highly collaborative product-development process that both accounts for and helps to determine sourcing requirements, production methods, marketing, sales, and other aspects of how goods are made and how they are handled at the end of their lives. The second is to use design thinking, which can help companies discover unexpected ways of meeting customers’ needs with much greater resource efficiency than in the past.

Further reading: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability/our-insights/developing-products-for-a-circular-economy