Vol: 11, Issue: 2 2021

Page: 112-129

Design Thinking for Sustainability; A Comprehensive Analysis of Design in Business Model Evaluation and Innovation

Hribhav Panchal

The process of creating circular and sustainable business models is highly complicated, which prevents their widespread market adoption. There needs to be more clarification and rules for businesses. A promising technique for issue resolution called "design thinking" has the potential to speed up the invention process. However, design thinking has yet to be extensively investigated for business model innovation and does not necessarily involve sustainability considerations. Given the additional hurdles presented by the requirement for time efficiency and a digital environment, we have created a design thinking-based framework to direct the early development of circular business models in an effective online environment. The Circular Sprint is a brand-new process system. This includes seven phases and twelve specifically tailored activities. The framework was developed using an Action Design Research methodology, with 107 people working in 14 teams and iteratively mixing four streams of literature, advice from sixteen experts, and six workshops. The framework and its operations are described in this paper, along with assessments of the framework's utility and usability. Despite its difficulties, the study demonstrates that it is undoubtedly feasible to integrate sustainability, circularity, and business model innovation into a design thinking process. We provide a flexible system and a collection of context-adaptable activities that might help practitioners and innovators in the challenging process of developing new circular business models. These resources can also be utilised for instruction and training. Future scholars are encouraged to expand and change our framework and its components by customising it for their scenarios and objectives. The supplemental material includes a thorough, step-by-step user manual.