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

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.