New Circular Economy Business Model for More Sustainable Urban Construction

CO-DESIGN, CO-CRERATION AND AGILE APPROACH AS CORNER STONES FOR CINDEROSS DEVELOPMENT

Digital tools can be of great aid for companies, particularly SMEs seeking new business opportunities offered by circular economy. Therefore, CINDERELA is developing its One-Stop-Shop (CinderOSS) to offer of a complete digital business environment to make the use of SRM-based construction products resulting from circular economy business models more transparent, traceable and attractive to users: i.e. investors, companies, local administrations and decision makers at local and regional levels.

However, developing a software solutions that would meet the expectations and real needs of its users is challenging. Therefore the methodology used for the CINDERELA One-Stop bases on an agile approach that involves incremental delivery and continual planning and learning from prototyping and numerous iterations before then final version is released. The approach requires frequent feedback from users to be implemented continually which makes the method very communication oriented and user focused.

Figure 1. Agile methodology used in CinderOSS

Integrating co-design and testing activities into an agile process provides us with an opportunity to verify the customer readiness level of CinderOSS.

For that purpose CINDERELA has planned a series of technical seminars as a a three-stage path leading to verify a specific Commercial Readiness Level (CRL) of CinderOSS.

The first session of one-day technical seminars was organised between November 2020 and January 2021 in Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain and gathered a total audience of 57 participants, including construction companies and waste stream holders, representing the entire value chain. The goal of the first test session, was to check the CRL level 4 of CinderOSS by verifying the assumptions developed internally by the consortium on CinderOSS’s value proposition with respect to customer needs. 

During the technical seminars the demonstration of the CINDERELA One-Stop Shop (CinderOSS) was followed by an open discussion.  The participants suggested inserting more content from different countries, in particular on the legal issues, incentives and policies, data on resources and resource availability. The need for SRM certification, quality checks on SRM-based products and even moderation of the content published in the CinderOSS database was also stressed by the participants.

Besides feedback on CinderOSS functionalities, the participants shared some issues, suggestions and concerns referring to the bigger picture, highlighting the country-specific contexts. The received feedback allows for the validation of assumptions and provides the data necessary to carry out optimisation of the CinderOSS and to reach the next goal, which is to achieve CRL 6 (product/service optimization) which will be tested in the second session of the one-day technical seminars.

Published
15/04/2021

Thursday 15 April 2021 - Last edit: Monday 07 June 2021