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from incineration to recycling. Secondly, the region’s growing,
innovative start-up community propagated more attention for
initiatives higher on the circularity ladder, for example, redesign
and reuse. And finally, local governments expressed the wish to
join forces in strategic areas, among them the circular economy.
This created a fertile ground to search for cooperation with them
in the Board’s circular economy programme. To assess their
willingness for participation, I visited the 32 municipalities and
explained the programme and their potential roles. As this form
of cooperation was also new for them, it took some time to get
all municipalities on Board. However, they all ultimately agreed to
align their activities with those of the Board’s programme. They
realised that coordination was useful to prevent everyone from
reinventing the wheel.
Together with the Board staff member I aimed to help create
circular initiatives with business partners, local government and
research institutes. Contrary to conventional innovation support,
we focused as transition brokers on system innovation and not
merely on individual business innovation. Our role was, and still
is, to search for promising circular initiatives, find an interested
lead business actor, connect this actor with relevant parties, help
realise the necessary preconditions for system innovation and
make sure that impactful, circular initiatives can be established.
To stretch the circular ambition of the programme, the aim was
to set up activities that focus on the highest possible options for
circularity. To identify these options, we used the aforementioned
circularity ladder.