Digital Technologies as Enablers of Circular Economy: An Exploratory Analysis of Functions and Product Lifecycle

IF 5.2 3区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS

IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management Pub Date : 2025-09-02 DOI:10.1109/TEM.2025.3605250

Lucrezia Sgambaro;Davide Chiaroni;Federico Frattini

{"title":"Digital Technologies as Enablers of Circular Economy: An Exploratory Analysis of Functions and Product Lifecycle","authors":"Lucrezia Sgambaro;Davide Chiaroni;Federico Frattini","doi":"10.1109/TEM.2025.3605250","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the role of digital technologies as circular economy enablers. We review extant literature to identify 15 digital technologies and characterize their enabling role along two dimensions: functions and circular product lifecycle. An exploratory empirical analysis has been conducted, leveraging a large sample of cases, to investigate the role of digital technologies in enabling circularity through those two dimensions. As a result, we develop our novel integrative framework that illustrates how each digital technology enables distinct functions along the product lifecycle. The integrative framework shows 131 examples of widely implemented best practices and provides a comprehensive vision of the functions that each digital technology enables along the whole product lifecycle. Among the others, we find that a broader set of digital technologies enables two functions, namely <italic>connect</i> and <italic>optimize</i>. We contribute to the academic debate in the nexus between circularity and digital technologies and we urge scholars to deploy the lens of the functions and a comprehensive perspective over the product lifecycle to fully understand the potentialities offered by digital technologies to achieve circularity. Our integrative framework represents a compass to managers striving to understand how to leverage digital technologies to implement circular economy.","PeriodicalId":55009,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management","volume":"72 ","pages":"4051-4066"},"PeriodicalIF":5.2000,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11146694/","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"BUSINESS","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Abstract

This article investigates the role of digital technologies as circular economy enablers. We review extant literature to identify 15 digital technologies and characterize their enabling role along two dimensions: functions and circular product lifecycle. An exploratory empirical analysis has been conducted, leveraging a large sample of cases, to investigate the role of digital technologies in enabling circularity through those two dimensions. As a result, we develop our novel integrative framework that illustrates how each digital technology enables distinct functions along the product lifecycle. The integrative framework shows 131 examples of widely implemented best practices and provides a comprehensive vision of the functions that each digital technology enables along the whole product lifecycle. Among the others, we find that a broader set of digital technologies enables two functions, namely connect and optimize. We contribute to the academic debate in the nexus between circularity and digital technologies and we urge scholars to deploy the lens of the functions and a comprehensive perspective over the product lifecycle to fully understand the potentialities offered by digital technologies to achieve circularity. Our integrative framework represents a compass to managers striving to understand how to leverage digital technologies to implement circular economy.

查看原文本刊更多论文

数字技术作为循环经济的推动者：功能与产品生命周期的探索性分析

本文探讨了数字技术作为循环经济推动者的作用。我们回顾了现有的文献，以确定15种数字技术，并从两个方面描述了它们的支持作用：功能和循环产品生命周期。利用大量案例样本，进行了探索性实证分析，以调查数字技术在通过这两个维度实现循环方面的作用。因此，我们开发了新的集成框架，说明了每种数字技术如何在产品生命周期中实现不同的功能。集成框架展示了131个广泛实施的最佳实践示例，并提供了每种数字技术在整个产品生命周期中支持的功能的全面视图。其中，我们发现更广泛的数字技术可以实现两种功能，即连接和优化。我们致力于循环和数字技术之间关系的学术辩论，我们敦促学者们部署功能的镜头和产品生命周期的全面视角，以充分理解数字技术提供的实现循环的潜力。我们的综合框架为努力理解如何利用数字技术实施循环经济的管理者提供了一个指南针。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management 管理科学-工程：工业

CiteScore

10.30

自引率

19.00%

发文量

604

审稿时长

5.3 months

期刊介绍： Management of technical functions such as research, development, and engineering in industry, government, university, and other settings. Emphasis is on studies carried on within an organization to help in decision making or policy formation for RD&E.