What does it take to succeed with Circular Design? Josefina Sallén is Expert Sustainable Business Models at RISE Circular Business Lab and the closing speaker in Track 2 A Mobility Sector Meeting a Disruptive Landscape on the first day of VECS 2025. Her expertise lies in advising businesses and public entities in shifting from a linear to a circular mindset through finding the sustainable business opportunities that work in their line of business. Josefina specializes in identifying and realizing business prospects grounded in the sustainable utilization of Earth’s resources. She brings a wealth of experience from prominent roles in diverse industrial sectors in Sweden and internationally, including automotive, pharmaceuticals, logistics, construction, chemistry, and management consulting. We had a chat with Josefina prior to the event in Gothenburg.
Could you please introduce yourself and your work at RISE Circular Business Lab?
I work as an expert on circular business models and how they are applied in practice within a broad range of businesses. Working at RISE with Circular Business Lab means that I have a steady foundation in the research being done at RISE. I then combine this with my personal experience from management positions in industry for 25 years previous to joining RISE. The strength with RISE and the Circular Business Lab is that we have to fortune to combine business, technical and societal research and knowledge, which is necessary when working with sustainable transition.
What will you speak about at VECS 2025?
I will share our experiences from 10+ years of research in circular business models, and how this has been applied with different types of businesses, and in particular with Vidde, the electric snowmobile. I will talk about pitfalls, risks and opportunities with circular business models.
What does it take to succeed with Circular Design?
You have to look at business and design as two sides of the same coin and let the design and the business model evolve iteratively. And you need a long-term perspective. At least with the definition of circular design that we use, “future adaptive design” that strive to preserve product value over time. If you design something to last radically longer than before, you need to have a business model that supports that. And if you see opportunities in stable income over long time, deriving from your product, then you need to design the product to being able to deliver that value to as low cost as possible, meaning repair, upgrade, maintenance costs should be designed to be predictable, or avoided.
How can you avoid pitfalls on the road to Circular Economy?
Rather than avoiding the pitfalls, try to learn from the mistakes you make, then it doesn’t matter how many you make. If you want to learn to ice skate or become a snowboard star, you cannot avoid falling. You need some courage to go against the stream, and you need a long-term vision, then the pitfalls will become your biggest support instead.
You can look at others and see what they do, but if you are not prepared to roll up your sleeves and actually do the work, you will not get there.
What are you most looking forward to by attending and speaking at the event?
As always, to meet the audience and other speakers, get new perspectives, understand what’s cooking in this type of business.