The pathway towards circular economy: Measuring circular advantage of eco‐innovations

Abstract

AbstractEco‐Innovation (EI) emerges as an enabler of Circular Economy (CE). A shift to the CE is a powerful opportunity for companies to create significant financial and economic value for business and society: the so‐called “circular advantage”. Companies have a crucial role as accelerators of the CE transition, although the identification and exploitation of CE opportunities that derive from trasformative EI being essential. With the aim to develop a multidimensional and multi‐actor approach to innovation in CE the present paper proposes an integrated Multi‐Criteria Decision‐Making (MCDM) method based on fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Interval‐Valued Triangular Fuzzy Numbers Additive Ratio ASsessment (IVTFN‐ARAS). The proposed method is conceived as a tool to evaluate the ability of Eco‐Innovative solutions to trigger company adoption of CE business models, the exploitation of disruptive technologies, and the enforcement of dynamic capabilities, which are all recognized as drivers of CE advantage. An illustrative application to a set of EU‐funded Eco‐Innovative projects is presented to clarify how the method works in practice. Discussion and suggestions for future research offer guidance to use the method as a policy‐making instrument.