Stakeholder engagement models in digital-enabled Circular Manufacturing ecosystems
Manufacturing companies approaching Circular Economy (CE) need decision-making support to take into account all the stakeholders involved in Circular Business Models (CBMs) and to ease their cooperation with both other industrial actors and final users. Indeed, even being protagonist of a small part of a product’s life cycle, manufacturers can affect both the user behaviour and the product’s end of life through product development and design. In particular, the design process needs to involve multiple stakeholders to build circular solutions’ value propositions embedding potential value that could catch a broader range of stakeholders instead of focusing only on either the customer or the provider perspectives. The extant literature calls for further studies to understand how to properly support companies to directly involve all the potential stakeholders in CBMs. Even leveraging the exploitation of Industry 4.0 technologies to enable and support the active involvement of external users during all the phases of a circular lifecycle, the complexity of circular solutions is raised because the involvement of more complex system of players can present additional challenges, either cultural and social or economic. Therefore, there is the need to focus on human action and involvement and to explore the role of human action in CE implementation, both intra- and inter-organizationally.
The aim of this special issue is to encourage original and latest contributions, and to review, apply and survey research dealing with models in digitally-enabled circular manufacturing ecosystems, focusing on state-of-the-art, exploring potential future approaches and technologies supporting innovation dynamics and organizations, and providing a good starting point for researchers entering these research areas and companies willing to practically involve external stakeholders in the lifecycle of their circular solutions. The special issue explores new approaches and perspectives of digitally-enabled manufacturing aimed at fostering the creation and/or strengthening circular ecosystems. Its aim is to gather a collection of papers on ideas, approaches, and technologies applied for fully exploiting the involvement and participation of external stakeholders along the lifecycle of circular solutions.
Edited by
Claudio Sassanelli (Principal Guest Editor)(Politecnico di Bari, Italy)
Idiano D’Adamo(Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)
Paolo Rosa(Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Mahtab Kouhizadeh(The University of Rhode Island, USA)
