The Design of Digital Platform Ecosystem Supporting Circular Economy

Abstract

Circular Economy business models rely on complex data exchange between organizations, which require a supporting digital infrastructure facilitating the circularity-related processes. In a digital platform context, value is generated not by the underlying technologies but by its allied ecosystem: community, users, developers, and integrated applications. These ecosystems come with an intrinsically complex interorganisational structure often overlooked during the development phase, leading to low platform adoption and obsolete platforms in the mid to long-term. Developed through a combined action-research and design science research approach, we propose a framework to support the design and deployment of circular economy ecosystems from a sociotechnical perspective, including practices from the requirements engineering, circular innovation ecosystems and digital platforms literature. © 2023, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.