Big Ideas to Power the Circular Economy
Week 4 of the Global Retail Challenge
- By [ Katie Nicholos ]
- 10/28/2019
This week’s assignment offered the students an opportunity to develop ideas and concepts that will help solve our Global Retail Challenge. Each team has created a portfolio of fifteen concepts that summarized their big ideas, how the ideas will work, what the desired impact will be and who will benefit. The teams seemed to have a lot of fun with this assignment and generated some great ideas.
This week's mentor, Lisa Davis, sustainability manager at IKEA US, helped the teams sharpen their focus as they began to make the transition from brainstorming into prototyping and testing. She offered two big takeaways:
- Be sure to ground your new solution in the needs of your customers. During the competition, we have talked about the value of taking a system-wide point of view in order to find opportunities for change within the entire value chain. Lisa urged every team to not only think about solutions from a systems perspective, but to also spend time with potential customers to make sure to understand the customer's point of view.
- Be specific about the circular principles incorporated into your solution AND prioritize circular principles that are higher on the circular hierarchy. After a quick introduction of the Circular Principles Hierarchy, Lisa urged teams to prioritize solutions that focused on eliminating materials, reused materials or refurbished existing products before considering recycling solutions.
- Team 1 - Ecole des Ponts,
- Team 5 - Vanderbilt University,
- Team 6 - Florida State University,
- Team 8 - University of North Carolina Chapel Hill,
- Team 10 - Ohio State University,
- Team 12 - Columbia University.
Here more next week, and take a look back at our first three weeks:
| Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 |
