Including Environmental Impact Considerations in the Business Model Innovation Process for Industrial Symbiosis: The GAIA model

Industrial symbiosis, as a collective approach for using excess resources, is considered a means to realizing a circular economy. Industrial symbiosis can be seen as a way of improving the environmental sustainability of individual companies’ business models, as well as a way of creating collaborative business models that are widely considered an archetype of circular business models in themselves. While there is a variety of tools addressing ideation, identification of potentials, concept development in the business model innovation process for industrial symbiosis, simple tools for estimating environmental impacts beyond rules of thumb are missing. This extended abstract presents the process and results from co-creating a tool called the ”GAIA-model”, based on systems thinking elements and consequential LCA paradigm. The tool was used in 42 business model innovation processes, spanning 16 different industrial symbioses in collaboration with 24 companies. Through exemplifying the use of the tool in two selected cases, this extended abstract illustrates how tools of this type can give users a better understanding of environmental impacts throughout the business model innovation process, where feedback loops, burden shifting, and potential adaptations are considered.