Leveraging Capabilities of Technology into a Circular Supply Chain to Build Circular Business Models: A State-of-the-Art Systematic Review

Abstract

The recent technological inclusions in supply chains are encouraging practitioners to continuously rethink and redesign these supply chains. Organizations are trying to implement sustainable manufacturing and supply chain practices to utilize their resources to the full extent in order to gain a competitive advantage. Circular supply chain management acts as the main pathway to achieve optimal circular business models; however, research in this area is still in its infancy and there is a need to study and analyze how the benefits of technology can be leveraged in conventional models to impact circular supply chains and build smart, sustainable, circular business models. To gain better familiarity with the future research paradigms, a detailed systematic literature review was conducted on this topic to identify the dynamics of this field and domains deserving further academic attention. A holistic and unique review technique was used by the authors to capture maximal insights. A total of 96 publications from 2010 to 2021 were selected from the Web of Science core collection database through strict keyword search codes and exclusion criteria, with neat integration of systematic and bibliometric analyses. The findings of this study highlight the knowledge gaps and future research directions, which are presented at the end of this paper.