Circular Bio-Economy Voyage: Its Defining Elements From the Managerial Vantage Point

Introduction

Independently, the multiple researchers in their body of work have explained the thematic areas of bio-economy (Hetemäki et al., 2017; Dahiya et al., 2018), circular economy (Schulte, 2013; Strategy, 2018) and circular bio-economies (D'Amato, Veijonaho, & Toppinen, 2020; Giampietro, 2019). They define the conversion of waste streams and resources into value-added marketable bio-based commodities (Dubey, Sharma, & Sangle, 2020). Followed by the circular principles (take-make-reuse) of waste minimisation and recycling options (Romano, 2012). The most recent category exists since 2015 is the circular bio-economy that is a unification of a set of two, i.e., bio-economy and circular bio-economy (Klitkou, Fevolden, & Capasso, 2019).

A circular bio-economy from the business and managerial perspective is less investigated and elaborated mainly by industrial ecologists (Näyhä, 2020; Cullen, 2017), briefly mentioned in their explicit narratives. Organisations having multiple outlooks ranging from entropic (tendency to change the state of order into a state of disorder) to societal to customers must comprehend industrial ecology (Endo et al., 2017) and management subjects parallelly (Kwan et al., 2018). The sustainably rich bio-resource regional deltas and valleys identification (Álvarez Jaramillo et al., 2019) by the businesses looking to exploit the circular bio-economic opportunities are the foremost and the most taxing assignments for them to achieve (Philp & Winickoff, 2017). The bio-innovations, designs and value-added bio-based products have an immense potential of achieving the maximum goals of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals of 2030. That even amounts to the $8 trillion opportunities for all the economies until 2030 (WBCSD, 2017). For instance, innovative strategies (Awasthi et al., 2019), value recovery models, sustainable technologies, significant energy return on investment (Herold et al., 2019), circular support models (Cosenz, Rodrigues, & Rosati, 2020), commercialising the innovative (Martínez‐Ros, & Kunapatarawong, 2019) products (Hetemaki et al., 2017), digital innovations, developing new circular business models (Näyhä, 2020), building on capabilities (Pradhan, Jena, & Panigrahy, 2020) and micro-entrepreneurs- all are essentials for achieving circular bio-economic principles of 9Rs. Refuse, rethink, reduce, reuse, repair, refurbish (restore old products), re-manufacture, refurbish, repurpose and recycle (www.eib.org).