Hoi, everybody! Welcome on board!
Starting from my master's graduation project, I have been connecting multiple types of key stakeholders in the concrete supply chain. Until this week, I am glad to announce that the industrial partner consortium is officially formulated and completed for my PhD project: Smart Circular Construction Ecosystems. You can check the figure below to see what role that you would play within the project scope:
Circular Stakeholder Business Ecosystem Based On Concrete.
There were extensive discussions about "Who is leading the group and where does this system start?". Obviously, people all see their own companies as the central point of everything with very good reasons. However, in this project, I humbly request you to think in a circular way by focusing on the fact that we all need each other to move forward and an "end" can be seen as a "start" from different perspectives. It is more important to understand how we can create a joint force together in order to resolve complex tasks in the resource-intensive market. It is more important to protect the diversity of the business ecosystem by opening cooperative windows for more new business partners. Therefore, I draw this picture as a circle without showing any traditional hierarchy between companies. Imagine when the circle starts to roll because of closed-loop material flows, everybody shares equal significance.
What is our research about?
It is not a trivial task to design regenerative natural ecosystems because we, human beings, are much less sensitive to our surroundings than animals. The natural ecosystem is not always as cute as we watch it with a kind narrator. Instead, it is highly efficient to an extent that we might think it is even cruel. Nothing is wasted. The beauty of such an ecosystem is more about how well these creatures can sense and adapt to each other in order to reach a dynamic equilibrium where mutual benefits are generated. Isn't it amazing to see how well they can communicate within their home communities and across different species? Physically, we are simply not fast enough to capture fleeting opportunities as they are.
This PhD project is fundamentally about systematic business ecosystem design based on robust information management by considering technological, economic, and societal factors. The design philosophy is going beyond the linear thinking and self-oriented mindset, towards a more transparent, collaborative, and regenerative paradigm of Smart Circular Construction Ecosystems. We aim to provide ICT-based solutions to identify, coordinate, and evaluate the business models built upon the dynamic supply-demand of secondary materials. We aim to find out a subtle balance between natural and recycled resources, among different industrial stakeholders, even across industrial and governmental sectors. We aim to reveal insights into how we can innovate ICT in a more responsible, greener, and valuable manner so that our behaviours and mindsets can be consciously guided towards a circular and cleaner future.
Of course, it adds more complexities to our lives. But we are trying to answer more fundamental questions in the society, which can have profound effects on our human being’s future in the long term, isn't it? Constantly, my awareness is growing so big that I can not ignore the core of Circular Economy is actually about people. We can not allow pathetic academic arrogance to hinder the interaction between science and society anymore. To blaze a new path towards a Circular Economy, not only do social actors need to make changes, but also researchers need to explore a new way of conducting research. I have to admit it is not always easy to make everybody happy, maybe it is just impossible to do so. In this regard, we spare no effort to serve as a bridge, a listener, a pivot, to ensure the scientific results can be absorbed into reality through a multi-disciplinary approach.
What is interesting for you?
You may have tried to tackle a problem within your own four walls. Towards Circular Economy is a particularly wicked problem and conventional thinking just isn’t cutting through it. Developing and applying our platform, Circularity Information Platform, would be a state-of-the-art case to put that circular problem publicly and look for ideas at a much broader level with people that are not necessarily steeped in businesses as usual. That is why the platform can be a powerful medium and collaborator. The platform is envisaged as an open information-sharing platform where organizations share a mutual purpose and have agreed to come together, share insights, and leverage each other’s perspectives to get more diversity of thinkings as well as solutions.
We focus on a small and handful of companies, you. So all of you together form a key part of the circular value chain so that we can start to approach the problem at a more collective level with more opportunities for changes. When one of you struggles to scale circular innovation without the wider shift in the value chain, we step in and provide essential support to explore the potential possibilities and benefits. To this end, it is important for you to have the ability to be able to zoom in and out of the picture. From tackling the very broad circular challenge by understanding the entire system, to breaking down the entire challenge into very specific problems in practice.
Practically, we hope the platform can be used by all of you and help you to streamline your circular business collaborations by providing higher resource efficiency and richer economic convenience, thus, fostering the co-creation of the added value to society as a whole. Scientifically, you have a great chance to be a representative business network model that can be recognized by scholars and practitioners all around the world. In such a way, the experience and knowledge obtained from you can be potentially summarized as universal applicable principles that are valuable and influential to the further advancement of Circular Economy at an international level.
Once again, welcome on board, everybody! Stay curious about what is going to happen.
Ik heb gezegd.