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The concept of the Circular Economy (CE) is an increasingly attractive approach to tackling current sustainability challenges and facilitating a shift away from the linear “take-make-use-dispose” model of production and consumption. The public sector is a major contributor to the CE transition not only as a policy-maker but also as a significant purchaser, consumer, and user of goods and services. The circularization of the public sector itself, however, has received very little attention in CE research. In order to explore the current state of knowledge on the implementation of CE practices and strategies within Public Sector Organizations (PSOs), this research aims to develop an overview of the existing literature. The literature review was designed combining a systematic search with a complementary purposive sampling. Using organizational sustainability as a theoretical perspective, the main results showed a scattered landscape, indicating that the limited research on CE practices and strategies in PSOs has focused so far on the areas of public procurement, internal operations and processes, and public service delivery. As a result of this literature review, an organizational CE framework of a PSO is proposed providing a holistic view of a PSO as a system with organizational dimensions that are relevant for the examination and analysis of the integration process of CE practices and strategies. This innovative framework aims to help further CE research and practice to move beyond current sustainability efforts, highlighting that public procurement, strategy and management, internal processes and operations, assessment and communication, public service delivery, human resources dimensions, collaboration with other organizations, and various external contexts are important public sector areas where the implementation of CE has the potential to bring sustainability benefits.

The smart specialisation approach is becoming a strategic instrument for identifying regions’ opportunities for growth and sustainable development. It is a place-based approach and plays an important role in benchmarking regional competitiveness. To have a smart specialisation strategy has been thought of as a key factor in making a choice for investment. Smart specialisation strategies represent a policy measure to overcome disorganised and weak parallel activities in developed EU countries and offer support to those areas that have research, technological and production capacity to carry out particular activities. Smart specialisation strategies, therefore, follow the socio-economic situation in countries and their integrated technological, institutional and business processes. The EU Member States and regions recognised that supporting a limited number of well-identified priorities for knowledge-based investments and/or clusters could advance, focusing on competitive assets and realistic growth capabilities reinforced by a critical mass of action and entrepreneurial resources. However, the role of culture and cultural heritage has not been significant in these processes. As the policy review revealed that circular economy should be considered as a broader sustainable development strategy, which should also “support Member States and regions to strengthen innovation for the circular economy through smart specialisations”, the purpose of this paper is to lay a basis for a new, stronger complementarity between culture, cultural heritage and adaptive reuse practices, and circular economy concepts through smart specialisation strategies.

The adoption of circularity indicators in the electrical and electronic sector is understood to play a critical role in organisational decision making during the transition from a linear to a circular economy. Yet, it is widely recognised that there is no standardised method of measuring circularity performance. Additionally, the extent of literature uncovers a range of shortcomings of existing cross-sector circularity indicators, including a predominant focus on end-of-life, limited coverage of social measurements, a lack of sector specificity and limited capture of product functionality, durability or sharing. Furthermore, the current electrical and electronic sector-specific circularity indicators focus greatly on repair and recycling, failing to acknowledge the significant impact on circularity of the design and manufacturing, distribution and use phases. Therefore, this research set out to answer how electrical and electronic manufacturers can measure the circular economy performance of their products by developing and testing multidimensional circularity indicators for all products’ life cycle stages. To achieve this, a two-fold qualitative approach was adopted. Firstly, a stakeholders’ workshop aiming to generate, categorise and rate novel circularity indicators was held. Secondly, a focus group piloted the resulting workshop’s circularity indicators. The findings highlight key factors that influence circularity indicators’ applicability to electrical and electronic products, including product function, service arrangement, and customer type. The research has implications for electrical and electronic organisations seeking pathways to the circular economy by understanding, assessing, and measuring the circularity of their products.

In recent years, cultural sustainability has attracted increasing attention within the discourse of sustainable development and sustainable cities. Notwithstanding some effort put on conceptualizing the relationship between culture and sustainability, research on the issue is still in a pre-paradigmatic stage and related empirical studies are scant. In particular, further knowledge is required to understand not only how cultural sustainability has been addressed strategically but also implemented in practice. In this direction, research has pointed out the role of social structures (e.g., partnerships, collaborations, etc.) for achieving cultural sustainability goals. However, focusing on smart cities, attention is limited to how collaborative arrangements can be leveraged within the development of new city services (e.g., smart open innovation) to sustain goals of environmental, economic and social sustainability, with cultural sustainability still playing a marginal role. This paper develops a new framework linking together the strategic level and the practice level in addressing cultural sustainability and conceptualizing the role of collaborative structures in the development of smart innovation. The framework is then used as a frame of reference for analyzing the case of MuseoTorino, a new city museum realized within the smart city strategy of Turin (Italy). The analysis provides evidence of some practices adopted to leverage collaboration and stakeholders’ engagement to strategically address cultural sustainability and to realize it in practice throughout the new service development process.

Repairers may play a substantial role in the shift from a linear (make, use, dispose) to a more circular economy, where resources are continually reused and waste is minimized, which is therefore by definition more sustainable. Repaired defective products are usually reused by their owners or may be traded in a second-hand market. A barrier commonly associated with trading is the endowment effect, which is caused by the difference between the maximum amount buyers are willing to pay for a product and the minimum amount sellers are willing to accept for a product. The present study examined whether second-hand market exchanges face an endowment effect, including in situations where the products are broken and repairers are recruited to repair possible defects in the product. An online survey that randomly assigns participants to one of eight experimental conditions (four product types × two buyer/seller statuses) was used for this study. The results show significant endowment effects for intact products and defective products with a repairer involved, but not for defective products. Furthermore, endowment effects occur for different product types. This suggests that sellers may be reluctant to sell their products in terms of the value that buyers would want to pay for them when repairers are easily accessible, which may impede transactions from taking place. The transaction of broken products may be facilitated by designing a system whereby sellers sell broken products to repairers and buyers buy repaired products from repairers.

Industrial Biotechnology (IB) is considered as a key technology with a strong potential to generate new growth, spur innovation, increase productivity, and tackle environmental and climate challenges. Industrial Biotechnology is applied in many segments of the bioeconomy ranging from chemicals, biofuels, bioenergy, bio-based plastics, and other biomaterials. However, the segments differ profoundly regarding volume, price, type, and amount of needed feedstock, market condition, societal contributions as well as maturity, etc. This article aims to analyse a set of five different value chains in the technological innovation system (TIS) framework in order to derive adequate policy conclusions. Hereby, we focus on quite distinctive value chains to take into account the high heterogeneity of biotechnological applications. The analysis points out that policy maker have to take into account the fundamental differences in the innovation systems and to implement differentiated innovation policy to address system weaknesses. In particular, market formation is often the key bottleneck innovation systems, but different policy instruments for various application segments needed.

Sustainable development is one of the fundamental and most important objectives of the worldwide policy. The conducted research shows that sustainable development (SD) is increasingly important in the consciousness of the EU countries, which can be viewed through a prism of the undertaken projects. This paper raises the issue of clusters and their significance in the development of a sustainable economy. The article explores trends in the European Union policy related to sustainable development and clusters. The purpose of this study is to find an answer to the following questions: How can clusters contribute to sustainable development and what are the key factors that ensure this process? To achieve the goal of the article a systematic study of the literature and reports was carried out. Moreover, the analysis of the activity of European clusters in the context of sustainable development was performed. Next, the examples of cluster projects focused on sustainable development were presented. It was shown that the clusters contribute a smarter and sustainable development by succeeding in technological and scientific results, developing new technologies for emerging industries, creating new business activities, enticing major technology companies, and connecting local firms into world-class value systems. Furthermore, the clusters participate actively in sustainable development as they promote knowledge creation, joint learning, technology transfer, as well as collaboration, and sustainable innovations. Finally, clusters facilitate the sustainable upgrading of small and medium enterprises and encourage the participation of stakeholders in the process of sustainable development.