Congratulations to Lucas Schuiling, Master Student Innovation Management at TU Eindhoven, who recently graduated!

His graduation project is called ‘Collaborative circular business model development for medical consumables: A case study from a medical polymer compounder perspective.’

His research examines the barriers and enabling conditions for collaboration, where upstream capabilities can contribute, and how stakeholders can be supported in collaboratively exploring circular business models.

Three insights from Lucas’ project


Science in 1 – No one can make healthcare circular alone
Making medical products circular requires different organisations to work together. Material suppliers, medical device companies, hospitals, waste companies and recyclers all hold different knowledge and control different parts of the system. No single organisation can make the whole circular solution work by itself.

This makes it important to first understand who needs to be involved, what each party can contribute, and where they depend on each other. The card toolkit and workshop the thesis developed aim to help make these roles and dependencies visible and easier to discuss together.
 
Science in 2 – Early choices shape what is possible later
Companies early in the value chain, such as material suppliers, can already make an important difference. Choices about materials, formulations and product design can facilitate the reduction of material use, the use of circular materials, or recycling later in the process . But these possibilities only become useful when they connect to decisions made further down the chain.

Science in 3 – A circular solution must work for the whole system
A product is not circular just because its material can technically be recycled. The solution also has to work with patient safety, regulations, hospital routines, collection, recycling, costs and market demand. The card toolkit and workshop were developed to help stakeholder explore these connections together: first understanding the current system, then exploring circular options, and finally identifying what needs to change, what information is still missing and what should happen next.

Lucas’ project was supervised by Duygu Keskin (TU Eindhoven) and Vikrant Sihag (TU Eindhoven).