Developing products for a circular economy

"Cross-functional collaboration and customer-focused design thinking can help companies reap more value from the energy and resources they use. Over the past 150 years, companies have steadily refined their ability to invent products and produce them efficiently, delivering a wide range of goods to consumers and improving financial returns to shareholders. In other respects, however, this system is far from optimal. Specifically, companies have hardly begun to reckon with the waste that occurs after products are purchased. When a consumer uses a product infrequently or discards it because it has worn out, at least some of the energy and material that went into making the product has been wasted." Eric Hannon, Marianne Kuhlmann, and Benjamin Thaidigsmann, McKinsey & Company, November 2016 Read more