Circular Economy and Social Innovation

The growth of the last century, with rapid technological advancement and the production of new wealth, is linked to the major environmental problems of this century - depletion of natural resources and climate change, but also to major social problems such as inequality and poverty. All this is causing an impoverishment of global culture, an issue with which the figure of the designer must confront, pushing beyond the discussion on sustainability. Social networks and co-creation platforms are gathering millions of different prosumers within creative communities, enabling them to collaborate and come up with new market solutions that increasingly expose the shortcomings of the old system, now disconnected from customers' needs and based on a resource-intensive use of resources that has become too costly. The Circular Economy is therefore part of a broader discourse, in which the new needs of companies are combined with the new facets of society. The contribution analyzes the Circular Economy Business Strategies and the sustainable design approach grouped under the Life Cycle Design, to highlight the link with social innovation solutions as the system Small, Local, Open and Connected (Manzini, 2009) and the Commons (Bauwens, 2019).