💡Give 2024 a headstart with our 2023 learnings💡

Go for circular business

Last year wasn’t a usual year. It was a year full of old and new challenges. Many businesses had to deal with growing challenges. To name a few;

• What if your supply chains become more volatile and disruptive?

• How to overcome geopolitical bans on scarce raw materials?

• How to win back switching customers pressured by energy and inflation crises?

• How to be responsible for a long and complex value chain?

• How to get an ROI when replacing legacy systems with new sustainable technology?
  

Quite challenging, right? But not to worry. Going circular may help you solve them. And as we must do in a new, circular economy, we’ll need to team up. So, we have been reflecting on which learnings of 2023 we would like to share with you. This way, you can build on them and give 2024 a headstart.

Our 2023 learnings

1. Think in ecosystems

Challenges like chain volatility and geopolitical bans can be overcome if you tackle them in an ecosystem. It's not a matter for individual parties but optimizing the resource loop throughout the chain. Therefore, when you collectively assess the issues on how best to solve them and redistribute the value, you can solve major problems together.

💡Explore the ecosystem you belong to. Volatility, geopolitical bans, scarcity, and legislation are shared challenges that only a collective of value chain partners can solve.

2. Focus on market readiness

Green and clean technology is being developed to move from fossil fuel products and production towards regenerating, renewable, or biobased alternatives. However, first-of-a-kind technology must withstand the 1st valley of death between research and the prototype. And a second valley of death after piloting at scaling. (Read more.) Therefore, the focus is primarily on technology, while the market is of equal importance to make the launch successful.

💡Combining needs identification with positioning strategies and testing with launching customers to collect user data for a better story will increase the chances of success. Making sure the market is ready when technology is also ready.

3. Bundle sustainable solutions

When you partner to solve a bigger societal problem, you can also serve the market with your existing portfolio and achieve a higher ROI on your sustainability investments. Start brainstorming with existing and new partners to build integrated solutions and solid governance between partners in the business model.

💡 Capture more value from your sustainability investments by combining hardware software and (data)services. For more traceability and transparency.

4. Keep the value after end-of-life

In some of our projects in 2023, the focus was on extending end of life of installed systems. The first step is to understand why customers are switching and what the remaining technical value of systems and products is. This can result in finding sweet spots for value propositions that are capturing even twice the business value from one system than before.

💡 It’s vital to understand the real-reasons-to-replace. And to identify the value of end-of-life. Often, this opens new opportunities for your installed base and adjacent markets.

Small steps for big impact

To navigate these challenges using our 2023 learnings, also remember that co-creating with a multidisciplinary team is faster;

• A diverse team will give you richer and better ideas for solutions.

• By continuously capturing assumptions, you can identify the biggest risks in the early stage.

• To identify how to mitigate risks, we build small business experiments: to shift facts from assumptions, end discussion and make progress: in small steps for big impact.

Let’s create profit to be proud of. Especially now that you're also responsible for things beyond your immediate control.

Is there a better way to embark on 2024?