Beyond business as usual? How organisations navigate tensions between circular economy and intellectual property right strategies

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) play a key role in the business strategies of innovators, hence also for companies innovating towards a circular economy (CE). IPRs can allow circular companies to benefit economically from their innovations but can also create tensions with their CE ambitions. However, a clear picture of such tensions and the way circular companies deal with them is missing. Our exploratory research aims to fill this gap by conducting in-depth qualitative interviews with frontrunner circular companies. Our results show that many firms experienced no tension between their CE and IPR strategies. If they did experience tensions, they found strategies to suppress, accept or resolve them. Instances where firms responded to tensions by clearly deviating from usual IPR strategies were rare. These findings suggest that most circular innovators embrace a ‘business case’ approach to circularity, which might limit the impact and transformative promises of a CE.