Leading European manufacturers are adopting circular business models, whereby they identify and collaborate with business-ecosystem partners to achieve environmental benefits while still meeting profit targets. The authors analysis of how 15 large companies are making the transition reveals challenges in aligning incentives and motives among partners, identifying new partners, involving customers, and planning for extended implementation.

To achieve positive economic, environmental, and social benefits, many incumbent manufacturing firms attempt to apply circular economy principles to their business practices. However, these firms often struggle to change their existing linear business models to circular models because the steps required for successful transformation are still poorly understood. Based on a multiple case study of eight business model transformation journeys, this article proposes a roadmap for circular business model transformation. It provides a step-by-step process to enable circular transition, allowing companies to meet environmental, social, and financial objectives and proactively address sustainability.

At most companies, innovation is a top managerial priority. Many managers look at successful innovators such as Apple Inc. and Google Inc. with envy, wishing that their companies could be half as innovative. To boost and benchmark innovation, managers often use quantitative performance indicators. Some measure innovation as results or outcomes, such as sales from new products; others measure innovation as a process, using metrics such as the number of innovation projects; some rely on input metrics; and still others focus on the innovation portfolio by looking at factors such as the percentage of investments in breakthrough projects versus line extensions. The key managerial challenge, the authors argue, does not lie in identifying metrics; there is no shortage to choose from. Rather, they say, it is understanding the problem that measurement should solve for the company and, based on that insight, designing and implementing a useful innovation measurement framework that is appropriate to the organization's needs. To do this, managers need to understand the innovation challenges the company faces, how innovation is currently measured, and the extent to which current measurement practices help or hinder efforts to achieve innovation goals. Only then will they be able to steer clear of common innovation measurement mistakes, such as placing too much value on data at the expense of meaning, or getting bogged down with too many measures that provide contradictory advice and incentivize employees to do the wrong things. The article contains a step-by-step framework that allows managers to identify whether their current innovation measurement practices need to change and, if so, how to go about measuring innovation more effectively. The framework is also aimed at companies that do not currently measure innovation but would like to start.

Front-end activities largely influence the outcomes of new product development processes, because it is here that firms create new ideas, give them direction, and set them in motion. We show that the front end can be understood as comprising three core activities: idea/concept development, idea/concept alignment, and idea/concept legitimization, which allow firms to create corroborated product definitions. This article provides important implications for managers interested in front-end management. It devotes specific attention to the differences between incremental and radical front-end development and to the front end in the light of increasingly open innovation processes.

This article explores how firms can benefit from opening up the new product development process by integrating the principles of open innovation with the Stage-Gate process. It examines the potential opportunities of employing the principles of both inbound and outbound open innovation within new product development at a firm in the upstream oil & gas industry. A practitioner-oriented work model, named the open Stage-Gate model, can exploit the advantages of "openness." This model allows explicit consideration of import and export of know-how and technology through gate evaluations and also enables firms to continuously assess their core capabilities and business model. The application of this model can assist firms in capturing value from both internal and external technology exploitation in increasingly open innovation processes.