Davide Chiaroni

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at Politecnico di Milano

The current linear economy has led to environmental pollution and resource depletion. To tackle these issues, a new economy model has emerged, namely the circular economy. Being a new economic model, the transition to a circular economy is particularly challenging for existing companies that have designed their business models and collaborations in...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the most recurrent variables characterizing the collaborative relationships of industrial symbiosis (IS) (hereinafter also referred to as “anatomic” variables) established in the attempt to adopt circular economy (CE) by collecting evidence from a rich empirical set of implementation cases in Ital...

Circular economy has gained much interest over the last decade as an industrial approach aimed at overcoming the traditional “take-make-dispose” economic model. Several studies argue that the implementation of circular economy principles by companies may require them to design a circular business model. Designing a circular business model implies t...

The main goal of this chapter is to present the Decision Support System (DSS) adopted in the context of Mogadishu to explain the different choices to put in place about three main issues: (i) the structure and input data, (ii) the setting of alternative scenarios, and (iii) the broadening of the perspective to include a strategic view for the decis...

Within the dynamic and fragile context of developing countries, often characterized by social, political and economic uncertainty, the present chapter proposes a methodology for assessing and selecting appropriate building technologies for affordable housing, including a method for the systematic classification of building components. The aim is to...

To implement a circular economy (CE), companies are pushed to innovate, respectively, their business models, from a micro-perspective, and their supply chains, from a meso-perspective. Despite the increasing research on both these perspectives, there is still a knowledge gap on how companies innovate business models and supply chains for circularit...

The circular economy (CE) has been lauded as a path enabling more environmentally sustainable economic growth for diverse industrial companies, requiring them to design and implement circular business models (CBMs). A CE widens a company's perspective to include supply chains when adopting and implementing a CBM; however, the intersection of CBMs a...

The purpose of this work is to highlight how companies operating in the building industry design a circular business model (CBM) and how collaborative relationships across the building supply chain enforce this CBM. Thereby, first, based on the literature, a framework is designed, and subsequently, is validated based on the historical analysis of t...

The circular business model has recently emerged as a new research field in the Circular Economy literature to call scholars and practitioners in strategic and innovation management for analyzing the transition of companies from a linear to a circular model. Among the several managerial practices put in place by companies to undertake this transiti...

The topic of sustainable affordable housing in developing countries is gaining increasing importance within international debates. The challenge is to find a balance between the concepts of sustainability and affordability in building construction within fragile contexts, overcoming basic self-made shelter solutions towards the creation of sustaina...

In the last years, circular economy has represented one of the most‐debated topics in management research. Although the understanding of this industrial paradigm has significantly improved over the last decade, a number of important research questions still remain unanswered. Among them, the design process of business model through which establishe...

The debate on retrofit of buildings has flourished in recent years and it has raised the interest of a growing number of researchers and practitioners. However, current research still lacks a holistic and systemic approach for measuring building retrofitting. The paper presents the results of a systematic literature review on the current state‐of‐t...

Research stream on Circular Business Models has recently emerged within the management research to address the concept of Circular Economy from a business model perspective. Several studies in this stream have identified and analyzed a set of managerial practices that can be adopted by companies to design Circular Business Models. However, current...

Circular economy has recently emerged as an alternative industrial paradigm to the traditional “take, make, dispose” economic model, with the aim to promote more sustainable resource consumption patterns and production processes. However, more empirical research is needed to address the topic of how circular economy is adopted in practice by compan...

Circular business model has recently emerged as a new paradigm in the circular economy research to call scholars and practitioners operating in the strategic and innovation management fields for analyzing the transition of companies from a linear to a circular business model. Among the several managerial practices that top managers can perform to a...

Guided by a technological revolution, widely discussed paradigms as servitization and Circular Economy (CE) are progressively pushing manufacturers towards delivering increasingly complex solutions. Design plays a strategic role in this sense, either considering products, services or Product-Service Systems (PSSs). Concurrent engineering and, speci...

The concept of circular economy is increasingly receiving attention in different domains, including strategic management, operations management, and technology management. It requires companies to design their business model (i.e., the value network, the relationships with the supply chain partners, and the value propositions towards customers) aro...

The increase of human incidence on the environment, in addition to a sharply depletion of resources and raw materials, is fostering the adoption of circular economy practices, at micro (company), meso (industrial) level and macro (country) level. From a company standpoint, the implementation of circular principles implies the capability to innovate...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework that highlights the phases and procedures that ought to be followed by companies to embrace circular business models (CBMs). In doing so, the paper shows how companies are facilitated in circular economy (CE) implementation by building collaborative relationships across the phases of the...

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and Circular Economy (CE) are undoubtedly two of the most debated topics of the last decades. Progressively, they gained the interest of policymakers, practitioners and scholars all over the world. Even if they have been usually described as two independent research fields, there are some examples presenting overlaps between the...

This article aims to understand and explain how eco-industrial parks can unfold over the traditional industrial production systems. Differentiating between the domain theory and method theory, we present an analytical framing that draws upon the strategic niche management perspective from the sustainability transitions field as the method theory, a...

The aim of this paper is to study what managerial practices companies follow and implement in their business model to manage the introduction of Circular Products. Extensively screening extant literature in the field, we clustered a set of relevant managerial practices in four main principles of Circular Economy (CE) adoption at the product level:...

Circular Economy (CE) represents a new industrial paradigm aimed to overcome traditional systems of production and resources consumption. Within the increasing debate among scholars and practitioners on how putting into practice CE, the research still falls short to deepen the managerial practices that companies implement to introduce circular prod...

Circular Economy (CE) represents a new industrial paradigm aimed to overcome traditional linear systems of production and resources consumption. Within the increasing debate among scholars and practitioners on how putting into practice CE, the research is still struggling in deepening the managerial practices that companies have to adopt to design...

Circular Economy has become a relevant topic in the strategic management field as it requires companies design their business model, i.e., the value network, the relationship with the supply chain partners and the value propositions towards customers, for a more sustainable consumption of resource and economic growth. However, extant research still...

The objective of this paper is to understand how industrial symbiosis initiatives can contribute to the emergence of regional industrial ecosystems for sustainability transitions of local industrial production systems. We offer a conceptual framework that integrates industrial ecology literature and strategic niche management perspective from the s...

In recent decades, industrial park (IP) development has been an important practice for regional economic development for various geographies. Eco-industrial park (EIP) development, on the other hand, has been proposed as an alternative, considering environmental problems raised from the high number of agglomerated industries in IPs. Although there...

A circular business model represents a holistic system of co-evolving managerial practices for collective value creation, delivery and capture, which provide solutions for sustainable development. Previous research on circular business models aimed to understand value creation mostly in terms of a single managerial practice or in a relatively isol...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the managerial practices that companies can implement in order to design a circular economy business model and how companies can create and capture value from a circular economy business model. Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts a single case study methodology with semi-structured inter...

Innovation scholars have long studied how and why new products and services diffuse into the market following trajectories such as the S-curve and in accordance with epidemic, social, and information cascade models. However, we see today many new products and services, especially those enabled by digital technologies, which do not seem to fit the a...

The research stream on circular economy business model tries to investigate the managerial practices that companies need to implement in their business model to address the principles of circular economy. Several studies have highlighted two main dimensions of business model on which companies can leverage to implement circular economy principles....

Both in theory and practice Circular Economy and Industry 4.0 have been historically considered as isolated mechanisms for economic growth, although some scientific contributions have recently highlighted strong synergetic relationships between them. Despite the existence of roadmaps for sustainable operations in Circular Economy through Industry 4...

Innovation scholars have paid special attention on the managerial approaches that incumbents should adopt to promptly respond to the emergence of disruptive innovations. These approaches include, among the others, the use of open innovation or the establishment of ambidextrous organizations. However, this body of research has not analyzed how incum...

Circular economy business models have undoubtedly become a hot topic nowadays both in academia and among industrial practitioners and companies. In this paper, we focus on the product design practices that can be conceived in circular economy business models along two major dimensions: (i) the value network, i.e. the ways through which companies in...

Circular economy has become a hot topic for scholars and practitioners as it represents a new industrial paradigm for waste generation, resource scarcity and sustainable economic growth that aims to overcome open systems paradigms, based on the traditional make, take, and disposal process. Whereas this issue has posed a lot of attention to the poli...

In the last years, management scholars have looked into the phenomenon of disruptive innovation, mostly focusing on the characteristics that identify a disruptive innovation and on the managerial solutions that incumbent firms should adopt to respond to the threat of a disruptive innovation. However, studying the characteristics of the context in w...

Digital transformation has undoubtedly become a key enabler of innovation as evidenced by the numerous firms that use digital technologies to manage their innovation processes. This issue is even more relevant today when innovation processes have become more open and require greater resources in the different implementation phases to capture and tr...

Innovation and change represent a necessary response to the challenges that new technologies pose to the electricity production sector, forcing producers to come up with new solutions and models of production, enabled by innovations in telecommunications and digital technologies, which allow the integration of service components into the utilities’...

Circular Economy has undoubtedly become one of the hot topics in public debates about new and more sustainable industrial paradigms and strategies. In this respect, the fashion of Circular Economy is in the fact that it aims at overcoming the dominant linear take, make, disposal economy model, i.e. “a traditional open-ended economy model developed...

Digital innovation can play a critical role in delivering more innovative solutions for the power generation industry, which is called to manage the complexity of massive electro-mechanical machines to produce energy. Building on a single case study of a large European technology company (the " Provider ") which sells Product Life Cycle Management...

Innovation scholars and practitioners are discussing at length on the use of digital technologies in the innovation process of companies. Most of them have paid special attention on the use of digital technologies to deploy or evolve systems for managing the life cycle of products or services, accelerate their realization, and pursuing them to reac...

This paper investigates the impact that the electricity tariff reform is likely to have on investments in renewable energies (i.e., photovoltaics) and the adoption of energy efficiency measures (i.e., installation of heat pumps and efficient home appliances) in the residential market in Italy. The study develops detailed cost comparisons and simula...

Energy efficiency plays a key role in reducing global energy consumption, especially in the industrial sector, with an indirect positive impact on the competitiveness of industrial firms. Although a cultural shift toward recognizing the strategic importance of energy efficient and environmental friendly solutions is diffusing among industrial compa...

Circular economy implies profound changes in companies’ business model to gain competitive advantage and mostly in the value network dimension. Notwithstanding, the supply chain management field has poorly focused on the role played by the value network to allow companies’ shift towards sustainable supply chains. This deserves particular attention...

Digital transformation has undoubtedly become a key enabler of innovation as evidenced by the numerous firms that use digital technologies to manage their innovation processes. This issue is even more relevant today when innovation processes have become more open and require greater resources and capabilities in the different implementation phases...

Circular Economy has undoubtedly become one of the hot topics, particularly in Europe, in public debates about new and more sustainable industrial paradigms needed for giving a boost to a post-crisis economy. In this respect, the fashion of Circular Economy is in the fact that it aims at overcoming the dominant linear take, make, disposal model. A...

Innovation scholars have long studied how and why innovations diffuse in the market following determined trajectories, such as the S-curve or the Bell-curve (Tarde, 1903; Ryan & Gross, 1943; Rogers, 1962; Shilling, 2005). However, we see today many new products and services – especially those enabled by digital technologies – that do not seem to fi...

Innovation scholars have long looked into the managerial practices that incumbents should adopt to promptly respond to disruptive innovations (see, e.g., Christensen, 1997; Birkinshaw and Gibson, 2004). These practices include, among the others, the use of an open innovation approach or the establishment of ambidextrous organizations. However, this...

An empirical analysis involving 130 Italian industrial firms showed that the economic viability of investments in energy efficiency technologies is mostly evaluated through indicators such as Pay-Back Time (PBT) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR), whose acceptability thresholds are affected by decision makers’ risk propensity and other contingencies...

The integration of intermittent and non-programmable renewable energy sources (RES), especially photovoltaic and wind, in the energy system is today a major challenge for most developed countries, due to their widespread diffusion. Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are a promising option to overcome the problems resulting from this integration....

This paper focuses on industrial systems at local level, addressing their main challenges brought by the contemporary learning based economies: sustainability and competitiveness. To do this, we have examined the relationship between innovation systems and sustainable industrial development at local level to comply with competitiveness and sustaina...

Many scholars within the innovation management field have investigated for a long time the concept of radical innovation, i.e. of an innovation that significantly changes the state-of-the-art of knowledge and technology in a certain field. In this stream of research, several scholars have focused on the concept of disruptive innovation, i.e. of an...

This chapter provides a deep analysis on the evolution of supply chains in renewable energy industries. Understanding how supply chains evolve during the development of renewable energy industries under the impact of an incentive system is critical to provide a comprehensive understanding of the approaches and policies that can foster sustainable d...

This paper focuses on a relatively neglected aspect of the open innovation model, i.e., the anatomy of the organisational change process a firm goes through when it modifies its strategic approach to innovation from a closed to an open approach. By analysing the case of an Italian firm in the renewable energy industry, this paper illuminates the ro...

Since 1997 when the Kyoto Protocol was ratified stating a 5.2% reduction of greenhouse gas emission levels of 1990 by the period 2008–2012, the interest for renewable energy sources (RES), due to their ability to produce electricity (and heat) with no (e.g., photovoltaics) or limited emissions (e.g., biomasses) of greenhouse gas, grew significantly...

The paper analyses the process through which an Italian-based multinational company that competes in the fashion and accessories industry, developed a roadmap for its sustainability strategy. The paper discusses the use of roadmaps, as a valuable instrument for fostering change and supporting strategic thinking about sustainability. Research method...

The open innovation concept has been extensively researched in the last decade and it still ranks very high in the agenda of technology and innovation management scholars. There are a number of questions still unanswered that should be thoroughly addressed to improve our understanding of this emerging innovation management paradigm. This paper leve...

The open innovation concept has been extensively debated in the last decade and it still ranks very high on the agenda of technology and innovation management scholars. A key issue for innovation managers, especially those working in mature industries where closed innovation projects still represent the largest share of a firm's innovation portfoli...

The advent of biotechnology in the late ’80s revolutionized the pharmaceutical industry and, in particular, caused a strong division of labour in the innovation process. As a result, the capability to master technological collaborations with external organizations has become a critical success factor for incumbent pharmaceutical firms as well as pr...

Out-licensing is a technology exploitation option to generate revenues without investing in downstream complementary assets. Despite its increasing strategic relevance, the strong complexity of out-licensing activity determines a substantial discrepancy in firms’ ability to extract monetary benefits from this practice. Searching for determinants of...

Although Open Innovation has been a highly researched and debated topic in the last decade, many relevant issues remain largely unexplored so far. An interesting question to address is whether and how Open Innovation has a dissimilar impact on the organization and management systems of firms working in different industries. The paper investigates t...

External technology commercialization (ETC) is increasingly being regarded as a strategic priority by companies. ETC is the use of out-licensing to transfer technologies that are disembodied from products to other organizations. Previous research has focused on the economic and strategic dimensions but little attention has so far been paid to how E...

This paper investigates the adoption of Open Innovation in the bio-pharmaceutical industry, studying through which organisational modes it is put into practice and how these modes are interwoven with the different phases of drug discovery and development process. Two rounds of interviews with industry experts were carried out to develop a model des...

Open Innovation is currently one of the most debated topics in management literature. Nevertheless, there are still many unanswered questions in Open Innovation research. Especially two issues require further investigation: (i) understanding the relevance of Open Innovation beyond high-tech industries and (ii) studying how firms implement Open Inno...

Existing empirical research indicates that strong organizational barriers and inertia need to be overcome to ensure a smooth transition of a firm's approach to technological innovation from Closed to Open Innovation. The objective of the paper is to study how firms can identify, plan, and manage a pilot project so as to unfreeze the status quo and...

Open Innovation has been one of the most-debated topics in management research in the last decade. Although our understanding of this management paradigm has significantly improved over the last few years, a number of important questions are still unanswered. In particular, an issue that deserves further attention is the anatomy of the organization...

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the factors underlying the difficulty that incumbent firms encounter, in comparison with new entrants, in the development and exploitation of a radical innovation, a phenomenon also known as 'incumbent's curse'. The paper shows that incumbent's curse is determined by different factors (organisational, stra...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the adoption of the open innovation paradigm in the bio‐pharmaceutical industry and investigate through which organisational modes (e.g. collaborations, in‐ and out‐licensing) open innovation has been implemented and how these modes are interwoven with the different phases of the drug discovery and...

Outbound Open Innovation refers to the practice of establishing relationships with external firms with the purpose to commercially exploit technological opportunities. Despite its increasing relevance in corporate strategies, Outbound Open Innovation is a complex activity due to the high transaction costs characterizing the markets for technologies...

This book develops and illustrates a comprehensive, multi-level framework for the evaluation of industrial R&D activities and the measurement of their performances. The framework encompasses a set of hierarchical, interrelated levels at which R&D evaluation and performance measurement could be undertaken. This enlightening book focuses on the singl...

The relevance and incidence of strategic alliances in business practice significantly increased since the past decade thus renewing the interest of management scholars on the topic. In a globalised economy, where technological innovation and industry dynamics are becoming faster and faster, strategic alliances of a firm are expected to change in nu...

Technical and Scientific Services (TSS) have been largely acknowledged by scholars and policy makers as means of knowledge transfer and diffusion within an innovation system. The paper argues that TSS play a critical technology bridging function especially in knowledge-intensive industries, significantly contributing to their development and growth...

Managing R&D in the semiconductor industry has long been a purely technological matter, with major improvements driven by the development of new solutions for computing systems. The advent of digital convergence actually opened up new opportunities for semiconductor companies to address an increasing number of final products, belonging to different...