Beyond business as usual? How organisations navigate tensions between circular economy and intellectual property right strategies
通过对前沿循环企业的深度访谈，研究发现多数企业未感到循环经济与知识产权战略存在冲突，少数企业则采取压制、接受或解决策略，但极少偏离常规知识产权做法，表明多数企业采用商业案例导向的循环经济路径。
Intellectual property rights (IPRs) play a key role in the business strategies of innovators, hence also for companies innovating towards a circular economy (CE). IPRs can allow circular companies to benefit economically from their innovations but can also create tensions with their CE ambitions. However, a clear picture of such tensions and the way circular companies deal with them is missing. Our exploratory research aims to fill this gap by conducting in-depth qualitative interviews with frontrunner circular companies. Our results show that many firms experienced no tension between their CE and IPR strategies. If they did experience tensions, they found strategies to suppress, accept or resolve them. Instances where firms responded to tensions by clearly deviating from usual IPR strategies were rare. These findings suggest that most circular innovators embrace a ‘business case’ approach to circularity, which might limit the impact and transformative promises of a CE.