For most of modern industrial history, businesses have operated through a largely linear model: extract resources, manufacture products, sell them, and eventually discard them. That model becomes strategically vulnerable when materials are scarce or volatile in price, supply chains are concentrated, waste is costly, regulations become more demanding, customers expect longer product life, and valuable materials leave the enterprise after a single use. The circular economy offers a different strategic question: How can companies preserve the economic value of products, components, materials, and resources for longer while reducing dependence on continual extraction and disposal?
Circular Economy & Resource Strategy is an advanced Junior MBA course examining circularity primarily as a business strategy, resource productivity, supply-security, innovation, and value-creation discipline. It goes beyond introductory sustainability concepts and avoids repeating the operational emphasis of a general sustainable or circular operations course. Instead, students examine how executives redesign value propositions, product architectures, ownership models, supply networks, partnerships, investment decisions, and resource portfolios around durability, reuse, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, recycling, recovery, and other strategies for retaining value.
Particular attention is given to the economics of circularity. Not every circular initiative is commercially viable, and recycling is not automatically the best circular strategy. Students learn to compare alternative value-retention pathways according to product characteristics, material value, collection economics, customer behavior, reverse-logistics requirements, technology, regulation, and the amount of embedded economic value preserved.
The course also addresses resource strategy more broadly. Executives must understand where their organizations depend on critical materials, how vulnerable those dependencies are, whether secondary materials can substitute for virgin inputs, how product design influences future resource recovery, and when closed-loop systems can create strategic advantage. The goal is to develop leaders who can distinguish genuine circular value creation from circularity that exists primarily in corporate messaging.
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
• Analyze linear business models for resource dependency, waste, and value leakage.
• Identify economically meaningful circular opportunities across products, materials, assets, and business models.
• Distinguish reuse, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, repurposing, recycling, and recovery strategies.
• Evaluate circular strategies according to value retention rather than assuming all forms of circularity are equivalent.
• Assess resource dependencies and material-security risks across enterprise value chains.
• Integrate circularity into product design and portfolio strategy.
• Evaluate product-life-extension strategies from commercial and operational perspectives.
• Design business models based on resale, leasing, sharing, product-as-a-service, and other access or recovery structures where commercially appropriate.
• Evaluate reverse logistics, collection, sorting, inspection, and recovery economics.
• Assess the strategic role of secondary materials and recycled feedstocks.
• Analyze customer adoption and behavioral barriers affecting circular business models.
• Evaluate partnerships and ecosystems required for circular value chains.
• Integrate circularity into procurement, manufacturing, supply chains, technology, finance, and corporate strategy.
• Develop meaningful circularity metrics and avoid misleading performance claims.
• Evaluate regulatory developments affecting resource use, product responsibility, waste, repair, and circularity.
• Assess investment opportunities associated with circular business models and resource technologies.
• Develop executive strategies for transitioning selected businesses from linear toward more circular value creation.
