Towards a Data-Based Circular Economy: Exploring Opportunities from Digital Knowledge Management

Abstract

Manufacturers are called to cope with always more complex challenges. Among all, the reduced amount of resources available in our planet forecasts a dramatic future scenario. Circular Economy (CE) is one of the most promising strategies. In view of the increasing interest in both Lean Thinking and CE, a first systematic literature review (SLR) has been performed to investigate the interlink between these two concepts. It unveiled common grounds and gaps, as the limited number of studies dealing with knowledge management (KM). Considering the new value obtained by knowledge, a second SLR has been conducted to study the application of KM as support for CE. Researchers explored KM application on all the three levels of CE paradigm (micro, meso and macro), almost ever highlighting the strategic role of technological systems to exploit data management under a circular perspective. Directions for future researches are proposed as main contribution of this paper.