Why do circular business models fail to scale? Strategic misalignment

Circular business models often fail when they’re designed without factoring how the business works, what the customers want, and what the product requires. These need to be considered together, not in isolation, to ensure that delivery, adoption, and revenue generation are possible at scale. Thinking about fit might feel obvious, but in this episode, we hear how many businesses often overlook these elements. In the second part of our mini series exploring the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s new report: How not to fail: Avoiding 10 common pitfalls when scaling circular business models , Pippa is joined by Maddy Oliver and Ella Hedley, who led the research on the paper. You’ll hear about three common pitfalls around strategic misalignment, and how to avoid them. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review or a comment on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Your support helps us to spread the word about the circular economy.

You can listen to Why do circular business models fail to scale? Strategic misalignment online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Why do circular business models fail to scale? Strategic misalignment is an episode from The Circular Economy Show by Pippa Shawley.

This episode is 00:15:20 long.

This episode was published on Oct 21, 2025.

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