Navigating the Circular Policy Landscape to Envision Business Futures

The changing EU policy landscape is a source of inspiration and creativity for us business developers when designing the resource efficient circular business models of the future. We warmly recommend you to review the EU Green Deal with the opportunity lens and take early measures to be ahead of the change.

When bringing up EU policy, you may associate it to the domain of compliance. As a business developer however, we need to go far beyond compliance. Indeed, we need to envision scenarios where we can proactively identify risks, seize opportunities, and drive adaptation and innovation to keep our business well positioned as the policy landscape changes.

So how do you turn the new policy landscape into a business opportunity?

At the Circular Business Lab at RISE we start out with a multidisciplinary approach to problem solving. You need legal savvy people on the business development team as well as product and materials knowledge. In our research we've studied the EU Green Deal in detail with a circular business lens, to capture potential future business impact. Together with companies we map the impact to their specific businesses and connect it to a timeline of expected implementation. Most companies are aware of the fact that they will be affected by CSRD, CS3D or the Taxonomy. But depending on your line of business and your product type there might be a whole array of policies that you need to consider. The coming Eco-design Regulation for Sustainable Products (ESPR) for example, will totally transform the competitive dynamics for producing companies. That makes policy navigation a highly strategic question with bearing on the fundamentals of how we do business.

The role of the business developer can be to raise awareness of how policy changes will impact business dynamics, identify key risks and opportunities and build resilience and capabilities to keep the business competitive.

As a second step we take measures to bring stakeholders to the same level of understanding by sharing the findings of the mapping. That enables everyone to contribute to the analysis of business impact, risks, and opportunities.

Finally, all relevant stakeholders are gathered to create a prioritized action plan and connect it to other business planning practices.

Making sure you're on top of policy changes doesn't have to be a big thing. But addressing it in a systematic way may become a matter of business survival.

About The Circular Business Lab at RISE

The Circular Business Lab at RISE is a membership based collaboration space for companies that want to transition to circular business. The Lab offers research-based competence to enable development projects with its members individually or in collaborative clusters.

Published: 2023-11-07