François Cluzel

• PhD
• Assistant professor at CentraleSupélec

The radical innovation design (RID) comparator is an unprecedented method for design comparison. It overcomes the limitations of traditional methods with a nuanced, structured approach that emphasizes detailed analysis over simple grading. At its core, the RID comparator employs a novel ontology based on the RID building blocks, enabling a precise...

The study provides an inclusive research landscape of the thematic trends and evolution in the field of metrics in the circular economy (CE), and also outlines future perspectives in circularity metrics (C-metrics) by exploring the relevant literature over the period 2011-2023. This study aims to bring further clarity to the wide pool of available...

The landscape of reuse and repair (R&R) activities for manufactured products is vibrant: new European laws, research projects, local initiatives. Our aim is to capture the current and future challenges of the field through an industrial workshop held at the ICED23 conference. A collective reflection was conducted with three French stakeholders: a P...

This research aims to address the increasing regulatory and environmental challenges associated with refrigeration systems by fostering innovations. Refrigeration systems, as socio-technical entities, present a challenge due to their complexity, diverse stakeholders, and evolving regulatory constraints. Identifying opportunities for innovation in s...

Circular product design is widely acknowledged as a foundational step for enterprises to implement and establish viable circular business models. To support this objective, it is vital for industrial enterprises to have an easy-to-apply practical design toolkit that can facilitate the assessment and enhancement of product circularity performance. T...

In big companies, Circular Economy (CE) is being explored, nevertheless, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) struggle to follow because of particular barriers and a lack of practical guide. Here, we use Style & Design, a French industrial SME, as a case study to explore how SMEs can perform a successful CE integration. This article aims at pr...

The defense industry tends to anticipate environmental issues through eco-design integration in the overall design process. This leads to focus on the impact of technological and design choices of complex systems while maximizing operational performance. Such development involves long and complex processes and is constrained in a project owner and...

Circular product design has been recognised in the academia as a foundational step for companies to make circular business models functional and viable. In this regards, it is vital to have a quick-and-easy practical toolkit providing diagnostics and specific guidelines on product design in terms of circularity performance. The present paper announ...

The growing global demand for refrigeration requires the design of more sustainable systems. However, despite environmentally promising technologies in refrigeration, there are still barriers to their widespread adoption. In this paper, a generic approach able to describe the multiple performances (energy, environmental, economic, social) of refrig...

У навчальному посібнику викладено теоретичні положення та методичні основи циркулярної економіки як альтернативи лінійній моделі. Зокрема, висвітлено зміст сучасної концепції нової моделі в контексті ієрархії ключових стратегій, наведено загальну характеристику наукових шкіл, викладено основні методи вимірювання прогресу циркулярної економіки, окре...

Critical literature review coupled with conceptual analysis provides a holistic framework for measuring a product's circularity performance based on its integrated contribution to the operationalization of various configurations of circular economy (CE) strategies. The following main results were obtained. First, we outline the "Сlosing-Slowing and...

Considering the growing number of metrics and indicators to assess the circular economy transition, it is paramount to shed light on how they complement and differ from traditional approaches, such as life cycle assessment or sustainability performance indicators. This study provides new empirical insights on the correlation between life cycle asse...

While the COVID-19 pandemic has led to many disruptions in industrial value chains, the adoption of circular economy (CE) principles appears to be a commendable solution for more robust, resilient, and sustainable industrial supply chains. In this study, the standpoints and visions of two consecutive classes of engineering students – following the...

A refrigerant system (like that of a supermarket) is a complex system if we consider all the stakeholders throughout its lifecycle phases (use, maintenance, technological update, end of life). The lack of stakeholders' interaction during the design and other lifecycle stages of such a system generates issues and leads to sub-optimal system performa...

Considering a growing number of metrics and indicators to assess circular economy, it is of paramount importance to shed light on how they differ from traditional approaches, such as life cycle assessment (LCA) or sustainability performance indicators. This study provides new empirical insights on the correlation between LCA, circularity, and susta...

Due to recent technological advancements, automation and autonomous solutions are gaining increasing popularity. Yet, a lack of in-depth investigations is noticed on the potential environmental benefits and economic repercussions of implementing autonomous systems. The present study aims to fill part of this gap by quantifying the environmental and...

Implementing circular economy (CE) practices can lead to both environmental savings and competitive advantages for companies. While transitioning from a linear production system to a closed-loop system is not straightforward, adequate methodology and tools can support industrialists in this sustainable shift. This paper proposes a multi-tool approa...

Serious games (SGs) are motivational and practical pedagogical tools that have been widely used in design education. SGs seem to be an efficient way to give instructions on innovation processes (IPs), offering unique and attractive environments to support situated learning. While there has been much interest in SGs of the IPs type, there is very li...

While autonomous machines are considered as a new opportunity to augment safety, reliability, productivity, and efficiency, the actual environmental and economic sustainability performances of many autonomous systems remain yet to be quantified. The present research aims to fill part of this gap by evaluating the life cycle impact and cost of auton...

Combining new insights from both bibliometric and text mining analyses, with prior relevant research conversations on circular economy (CE) and industrial ecology (IE), this paper aims to clarify the recent development trends and relations between these concepts, including their representations and applications. On this basis, discussions are made...

Combining new insights from both bibliometric and text mining analyses, with prior relevant research conversations on circular economy (CE) and industrial ecology (IE), this paper aims to clarify the recent development trends and relations between these concepts, including their representations and applications. On this basis, discussions are made...

Brought by the need for competent approaches to assess the financial cost and environmental impact towards service design-for-cost-and-environment, this paper investigates on the following service representation approaches: Service Blueprinting, Process Chain Network, Business Process Model & Notation, and Customer Journey Mapping. An ontological a...

This paper investigates and questions the relevance of product-centric circularity indicators in a product design context. To do so, reviews of eco-design tools and critical analyses of circularity indicators at the micro level of circular economy implementation are combined with a new workshop experimenting four of these indicators with the aim to...

Ecodesign has gained significant traction in recent years ranging from academic research to business applications at a global scale. Initial emphasis on the environmental aspect of design has evolved to include economic and social aspects, with projects ranging from small-scale products to large-scale industrial systems. In this paper, the authors...

To date, a limited number of in-depth case studies addressing the end-of-life management of heavy vehicles has been reported in the scientific literature. An action research approach is conducted in collaboration with an emerging international remanufacturing center of heavy handling machines to bring a contribution to this gap in a circular econom...

Nowadays, refrigeration is responsible for approximately 17% of the total electricity used worldwide and around 8% of greenhouse gas emissions. Since the Kyoto Protocols, refrigerants are subject to new regulations which represents a major challenge for the refrigeration industry. Almost half of the energy used in food retail is for cold production...

Setting the sustainable transition in motion implies reflecting on all areas linked with human activities and in all types of organizations. This transition has been examined in research for many industrial activities, however a reflective positioning on the environmental impacts associated with professional activities, and notably research ones ar...

Feature of the article "Closing the loop on platinum from catalytic converters: Contributions from material flow analysis and circularity indicators" (Journal of Industrial Ecology, 23(5), 1143-1158) in Science for Environment Policy, European Commission DG Environment News Alert Service.

Around 40% of the platinum used in EU catalytic converters is not recovered for recycling and is therefore ‘lost’ forever, indicates a new study. A more circular economy for platinum is essential to reduce imports of this critical raw material to the EU and minimise its damaging effects on the environment, the researchers argue. Better collection s...

Taking into consideration all the life cycle of a product is now an important step in the design of a product or a technology. Despite the improvement in refrigerant regulation, the environmental impacts of refrigeration systems remain important and need to be improved. In this paper, the environmental impacts of refrigeration systems in a typical...

In response to the growing development of a wide variety of circularity indicators (c-indicators), a taxonomy has been developed to gain clarity about their focuses, purposes and possible usages (e.g., benchmarking several circular economy business models, comparing two product designs on their potential circularity performance). The advisor linked...

The purpose of this paper is to develop and discuss a framework aiming at monitoring and optimizing the circularity performance of products for ensuring and facilitating green profit design trade-offs whilst meeting or anticipating end-of-life regulations during the design and development process of industrial products. The proposed framework is us...

Monitoring properly the circularity performance of technical products is a point of increasing importance. Yet, evaluating the circularity potential of products during (re)design and development phases is a challenging task. In this study, several C-indicators are experienced by doctoral students and industrialists through two workshops on a real-w...

Societies are challenged worldwide to maintain or improve the life of an ageing population. In the meantime, it is an opportunity for businesses to develop products and services for the elderly. Participatory design - or co-design - promotes not only to design for, but also with and by older adults. Current studies tend to emphasize more field inve...

In a context of transition towards a more circular economy (CE), this study undertakes an analysis of the appropriate transfers and applications of best managerial practices, regulations, and know-how from the automotive sector to the heavy vehicle one, as well as from the European Union (EU) to the United States of America (U.S.), and vice versa....

Serious games (SGs) as a new educational format have gained interest among many scholars from diverse fields. SGs seem to be useful tools for teaching innovation processes (IP) as they guarantee intrinsic motivation and provide situated learning. So far, there is no guideline on designing IP games and lowering their development time while ensuring...

This supporting information provides details of the model design, simulation, and feedback from technical experts on the leakage of platinum during the use phase of catalytic converters.

In this study, material flow analysis (MFA) is applied to quantify and reduce the obstacles for advancing a circular economy (CE) of platinum (Pt) from catalytic converters (CC) in Europe. First, the value chain and related stakeholders are mapped out in an MFA‐like model to both facilitate the assessment of stocks and flows, and get a comprehensiv...

Être capable de mesurer, améliorer et piloter la performance de circularité des produits industriels est d’importance capitale dans une période de transition vers des pratiques industrielles plus circulaires, en phase avec les objectifs du développement durable. Toutefois, sans définition stabilisée de l’économie circulaire, le nombre d’indicateurs...

Implementing circular economy (CE) principles is increasingly recommended as a convenient solution to meet the goals of sustainable development. New tools are required to support practitioners, decision-makers and policy-makers towards more CE practices, as well as to monitor the effects of CE adoption. Worldwide, academics, industrialists and poli...

Implementing circular economy (CE) principles is increasingly recommended as a convenient solution to meet the goals of sustainable development. New tools are required to support practitioners, decision-makers and policy-makers towards more CE practices, as well as to monitor the effects of CE adoption. Worldwide, academics, industrialists and poli...

There has been rising interest in confronting formal models of design with practical design methods, in order to understand better both and to explore how they can improve each other. In this article, we try to map the Radical Innovation Design (RID) methodology in Gero’s Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) framework. We encounter difficulties in doi...

Experimentation and validation tests, in the context of technology startups, are often costly, time-consuming, and, above all, not well organized. A review of the literature shows that existing tools and methods are either oriented towards lean iterative tests or strongly focused on technology improvement. There is therefore a gap to bridge by prov...

Over 50 sets of circularity indicators – created and used by academia, consulting companies and governmental agencies worldwide – have been reviewed and classified into a need-based taxonomy driven by the usage of such indicators. A query tool associated to the proposed taxonomy databank – using MS Excel with macros – has been designed to help iden...

With 270 million light vehicles and 20 million heavy-duty and off-road (HDOR) vehicles in use in the European Union, automotive and HDOR industries are two major sectors in the European economy. Each year, 12 million light vehicles plus 1 million HDOR vehicles reach their end-of-life. In a context of circular economy, following questions are of gro...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) assesses the environmental performance of products through their entire life cycle. LCA-based decision-making usually focuses on environmental impact, omitting other considerations, such as customer expectations and economic aspects. Although the environmental performances of industrial systems are highly dependent on op...

Literature reports that abduction is inherent to design reasoning. Radical Innovation Design methodology is analyzed using the lens of Kroll and Koskela's two-step innovative abduction. Whereas in second phase of Problem Solving the logical reasoning is conventionally a two-step innovative abduction, in first phase of Problem Setting: the Knowledge...

Automobile ownership worldwide has exceeded 1 billion since 2010, and the U.S. plus the EU account for 50% of this total (Sakai et al. 2014). According to Wilson (2017), CEO of the U.S. Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA): “Different countries are on different parts of the path related to end-of-life management of vehicles. By looking at how oth...

While the diffusion and evaluation of healthcare innovations receive a lot of attention, the early design stages are less studied and potential innovators lack methods to identify where new innovations are necessary and to propose concepts relevant to users. To change this, we propose a structured methodology, Radical Innovation Design (RID), which...

Après avoir fait le constat que les grandes entreprises françaises pilotent encore très peu leur processus d’innovation, nous établissons le besoin d’une organisation et d’une méthodologie d’innovation radicale tirée par les usages. Nous avons développé et expérimenté depuis 2009 une méthodologie d’innovation radicale tirée par les usages, dénommée...

Après avoir fait le constat que les grandes entreprises françaises pilotent encore très peu leur processus d’innovation, nous établissons le besoin d’une organisation et d’une méthodologie d’innovation radicale tirée par les usages. Nous avons développé et expérimenté depuis 2009 une méthodologie d’innovation radicale tirée par les usages, dénommée...

Industrial practitioners are increasingly willing to shift their products and businesses into more circular models. Circular economy paradigm requires optimization of system rather than components. Yet, existing methods and tools, intended to designers, engineers or managers, to assess and improve products' circularity potential are both lacking sy...

Companies make substantial R&D investments in early design stages to develop radically innovative products. However, despite abundant research work in the field of human-centered design, the front end of innovation is the least well-structured part of the innovation process. Radical Innovation Design (RID) methodology has put forward a structured p...

The issue of recovering platinum from catalytic converter of heavy vehicles, arises for economic (high valuable component due to the non-negligible presence of platinum that costs around 30 €/g), environmental (low platinum concentration in mines (below 10 g/t) required large consumption of energy), social (ore mining conditions are increasingly dr...

A great deal of work has been done to characterize entire sets of ideation indicators as well as isolated factors of innovativeness. Nevertheless, entire sets of innovativeness indicators are essential in business innovation competitions, as well as within companies in order to select promising innovative project seeds. In this paper, a complete se...

Assessing product circularity performance is not straightforward. Meanwhile, it gains increasingly importance for businesses and industrial practitioners who are willing to effectively take benefits from circular economy promises. Thus, providing methods and tools to evaluate then enhance product performance—in the light of circular economy—becomes...

The Dependency Structure Modelling Value Bucket (DSM-VB) tool is integrated into Radical Innovation Design (RID) methodology in order to explore the front end of innovation in need seeker mode. The determination of innovation opportunities, here called value buckets, has been automated by matrix representations of dependencies between problems or p...

The French network Eco-design of Sustainable Systems (EcoSD) has initiated collaborative research projects in order to foster collaborations between academic and industrial partners. Two projects concerning eco-innovation processes, methods and tools have been carried out between 2012 and 2014. This paper first offers a synthesis of the projects, a...

Ambitious building retrofits are often hardly justified by energy savings only. A previous research project has shown that dividing by two the energy consumption of a building (like a school) may lead to a return on investment superior to 25 years [RS4E, 2010]. In this configuration, decision-makers are often not inclined to invest. Thus there is a...

This paper aims at investigating, through several examples of innovative startups, different categories of Urban-Centered Innovative (UrCI) design solutions as well as the necessity to conduct real life experimentations supported by public and private stakeholders. This research will also shed light on the reasons why some urban-centered innovation...

In this paper, the importance of problem setting in front end of innovation to radically innovate is emphasized prior to the use of the BMC. After discussing the context of the Business Model Canvas usage, the failure reasons of a premature use (in early design stages) of the BMC tool is discussed through some real examples of innovative startups i...

Industrial companies increasingly want to eco-innovate in their project but have to deal with strict constraints in time and resources. Thus, a time-efficient eco-innovation workshop process for complex system industries is proposed. From the selection of a relevant multidisciplinary working group (before the workshop) to the follow-up of environme...

A great deal of work has been done to characterize entire sets of ideation indicators as well as isolated factors of innovativeness. Nevertheless, entire sets of innovativeness indicators are essential in business innovation competitions, as well as within companies in order to select promising innovation seeds. In this paper, a complete set of inn...

This chapter synthetizes the round table chaired during the last part of the workshop by Pr. Bernard YANNOU with six industrial and institutional participants, whose short biography is provided below. The objective of the round table was to confront the research work presented in the previous parts of the workshop with the reality of companies and...

Cities play an essential role in facilitating and supporting the real-world experimentations (for instance in public spaces with real users) of innovative products and services in the field of clean technologies. In this respect, the City of Paris has implemented an experimentation mechanism to help innovative start-ups improving their solutions an...

In early eco-innovation phases, design teams need to assess the environmental relevance of ideas, and consequently, the evaluation stage becoMES even more critical, subjective and uncertain than in traditional design. This paper tackles the following question "How to turn elementary ideas into concepts with a high environmental potential in a desig...

The Dependency Structure Modelling Value Bucket (DSM-VB) tool is integrated to Radical Innovation Design (RID) methodology for exploring the front end of innovation in need seeker mode. The determination of value buckets has been automated by matrix representations of dependencies between problems or pain points, usage situations and existing solut...

A lot of work is done on ideation metrics but less is done for innovation metrics, i.e. monitoring an ideation process with the goal of augmenting idea maturity and increasing likelihood for the idea to be transformed into an innovation success on the market. To that aim, metrics of utility, profitability and proof of concept (feasibility) are cons...

A lot of work is done on ideation metrics but less is done for innovation metrics, i.e. monitoring an ideation process with the goal of augmenting idea maturity and increasing likelihood for the idea to be transformed into an innovation success on the market. To that aim, metrics of utility, profitability and proof of concept (feasibility) are cons...

The Dependency Structure Modelling Value Bucket (DSM-VB) tool is integrated to Radical Innovation Design (RID) methodology for exploring the front end of innovation in need seeker mode. The determination of value buckets has been automated by matrix representations of dependencies between problems or pain points, usage situations and existing solut...

Vous avez commencé à structurer un projet d’innovation à partir d’une idée initiale. La connaissance des usagers, ou plus largement des bénéficiaires du produit ou service que vous souhaitez développer, est absolument essentielle. Pourtant peu de porteurs de projet aujourd’hui prennent réellement le temps d’observer. Cette fiche vous permettra de c...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodology to assess environmental performances of products throughout their life cycles. Traditionally, LCA-based decision-making focuses on environmental impacts, excluding customer expectations and economic considerations. Moreover, it usually uses generic data while environmental performances of industrial syst...

This paper aimed at defining the features and goals of eco-innovation compared to eco-design in industry. Both academic and normative approaches have difficulties establishing sharp boundaries (. That is why) as shown by a survey conducted with 12 French industrial organizations (was conducted. Results confirm this ambiguity). As an emerging topic,...

Purpose This paper considers the variabilities that exist in the exploitation of a complex industrial system. Our scenario-based LCA model ensures the reliability of results in situations where the system life cycle is very uncertain, where there is substantial lack of data, and/or where time and resources available are limited. It is also an effec...

Le carnet de bord de l’investigation est le premier livrable de la méthodologie d’innovation radicale tirée par les usages, Radical Innovation Design® (RID). Il vise à initier un projet d’innovation de manière organisée, en planifiant les tâches d’investigation qui permettront à l’équipe projet de monter en compétences et connaissances.