Sufficiency-based Circular Business Models: An established retailers’ perspective

Abstract

Taking on the much-criticized concepts of green growth, bioeconomy, or efficiency, both sufficiency and, in certain circumstances, the circular economy, are presented as potential new paradigms that can play a central role in a transition towards a stronger sustainability and enable humanity to stay within planetary boundaries (Alexander, 2012; Bocken and Short, 2020; Jackson, 2005; Raworth, 2017). While businesses have a role to play in the transition, scholars point to the need for more disruptive, sufficiency-based circular business models that focus on slowing material and value loops, but are traditionally less understood practitioners and more difficult to implement in practice (Bocken and Short, 2016; Walker et al., 2021). In this context, this ongoing work focuses on the following research question: how and to which extent can sufficiency-based circular strategies transform established retailers business models? Through a combination of action research and case studies, we aim at providing useful insights to practitioners and the nascent academic literature on the topic (Jungell-Michelsson and Heikkurinen, 2022). Following the foundational article by Niessen and Bocken (2021), we identify new sufficiency-based circular practices that contribute to enrich the business for sufficiency framework. Through concrete examples, we also show that sufficiency-based business models can scale up, and describe some of the associated processes. On a less optimistic note, we highlight some limitations of the observed ongoing upscaling processes, amongst which stand the limited number of retailers that started such a process, the limited contributions of these new practices to overall value creation and capture at the firm level, and clear evidence of rebound effects.