Assessing the strengths and limitations of Business Model Frameworks for Product Service Systems in the Circular Economy: Why Canvas and co. are not enough

Abstract: Today’s value chains rely strongly on a virgin material to ‘take-make-dispose’ products.One way to reduce that dependency on finite resources is a circular economy (CE).Different pillars form the concept, this research paper focuses on Product-ServiceSystems (PSS) in which a customer instead of buying a product for example only paysfor the use of one.Companies who want to transfer towards a circular business model (BM) facetremendous organisational challenges. They cannot just modify some parts of theiroperations, they have to change the entire BM. Much of the literature and t on BM is aresult of e-business and therefore not necessarily suitable for circular BM.To investigate if the current tools are suitable, the aim of the research is to answer thequestion: Do existing BM Frameworks cover the information requirements for PSS BMswithin the CE.The paper provides a literature review on two bodies of knowledge. First it explains thecharacteristics of PSSs in the context of a CE; secondly, it describes the different BMframeworks which are assessed in this research.To answer the research question, three sub-questions are formed on values, activitiesand stakeholders of a BM to be applied on the BM frameworks. The research follows atwo-step approach to answer these sub-questions, in a first step 9 experts fromacademia, consultancy and business were interviewed on characteristics of PSSs.Based on these characteristics, 26 questions were defined to assess the strength andlimitations of the 9 BM frameworks.As the analysis of this assessment shows, future work is necessary to develop suitableBM frameworks for PSSs and scaled up to the entire CE. The research does notpropose a new BM framework but rather points on lacks in current ones and suggestspossible further research to locate these lacks. Further, the two-step approach as aresearch methodology can be used to connect and assess any kind of expertknowledgewith existing literature or frameworks.