A systematic literature review on the digital platform and its role in the circular economy: State-of-the-art and future research directions

Abstract

A digital platform is an extensible codebase built on programmable systems that facilitates interoperation between software systems through a shared module and an interactive interface (Tiwana et al., 2010). Although digital platforms, enabled and supported by information technologies, have seen increasing applications across various sectors over the past decade—particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic—their potential to facilitate and support the transition to a circular economy remains unclear. Accordingly, this research aims to address this critical gap by systematically reviewing the literature on digital platforms and the circular economy from 2010 to 2020 and presenting directions for future research. Our findings reveal that digital platforms have been extensively utilised across ten industries: the sharing economy, social media, labour, healthcare, third-party payment, crowdfunding, lending, e-commerce, tourism, and food. Given the diversity of these sectors, the literature exhibits distinct characteristics and trends. Overall, digital platforms contribute to achieving circular economy objectives by reducing, redistributing, and reutilising waste through enhanced information exchange, improved efficiency and effectiveness in supply network operations, and greater co-innovation.