| dc.description.abstract | Business model innovation and business ecosystem strategies have been considered as important approaches for manufacturing firms to move towards a circular economy. The concepts of business model and business ecosystem are highly relevant to each other, and thus often misused, resulting in misconceptions in both academic and industrial applications. There is a lack of understanding of the boundaries between business models and business ecosystem of many firms, how they interplay with each other and how they could use this interplay to enhance their circular economy activities.
To address these gaps, this research aims to advance the theoretical understanding of the circular business ecosystem, discover new elements of business ecosystems, and reveal the interplay between business model (innovation) and business ecosystem towards the circular economy, as well as develop a tool to support manufacturing firms’ decision-making for adapting and further shaping the circular business ecosystem.
This research adopts an engaged scholarship strategy and uses multiple case studies and action research to analyse five manufacturing firms in China. Qualitative analysis is used to explain and understand non-numerical data collected from documentation, observation, and focus groups. Comparable case studies, pattern-matching and explanation-building approaches for each case, replication logic of analysis, highlighted evidence chains, utilising within-case and cross-case analyses, periodic meetings conducted in the action research, storytelling of the case studies, and the abstraction of crucial factors, elements, and insights provide a distinctly repeatable pattern to enhance the internal validity, external validity, construct validity, and reliability of this research.
The key research findings and theoretical contributions are:
• The research proposes a three-dimensional business ecosystem model. It is in the form of a heptagonal prism structure representing the basic and extended constructs of the business ecosystem from a longitudinal perspective. It provides a novel understanding of the context of the business ecosystem in addition to the existing study (Rong et al., 2015a) and a theoretical framework to explore the business ecosystem further.
• The research reveals the mechanisms of the interplay between business models and business ecosystems. It provides a longitudinal view to evaluate a business model (innovation) through the cyclically occurring adaptation and shaping processes. It can guide the improvement of the business model to coevolve with the business ecosystem. It also addresses the suggested future research (i.e., interactions between circular business ecosystems and circular business models based on real business cases) proposed in a recent study (Boldrini & Antheaume, 2021).
• The research introduces a new concept, the optimal timing point, which indicates the integrated and accumulated dominative advantages based on the circular business ecosystem. It allows firms to visualise and make decisions at relatively good timing points according to the specific situation in the business ecosystem and the development objectives of the firm.
• The research proposes the logic of applying circular economy strategies from a business ecosystem perspective. It adds two new strategies (i.e., redesign and relocation) to the ten traditional circular economy strategies. It classifies the twelve circular economy strategies into four orientations, contributing to substantive new knowledge by explaining the coevolution between the circular business model (innovation) and the circular business ecosystem.
The findings have been developed into a Circular Business Ecosystem Strategic Tool. It simplifies the business ecosystem analysis and allows the comparative or longitudinal evaluation results to be visualised. Furthermore, the tool has been validated through action research. Therefore, this research makes contributions both in academics and industrial practice.
This research highlights 1) the quantified scale of the business ecosystem model, which can facilitate a more accurate evaluation of the optimal timing point; 2) converting the basic construct of the business ecosystem from a planar structure to an undulating structure, which can enrich the business ecosystem model and more accurately illustrating the coevolution between the business model and the business ecosystem; 3) extending the number of elements, sampling size, data collection range, and geographical range, which can enhance the implementation of the circular economy in business ecosystems as three future research directions to facilitate academic exploration. | en_GB |
