About the tool

The Guidelines for Circular Product Development presents a large range of concrete guidelines for developing more circular products. The guidelines should be used in the early product development, starting already from the concept development. The guidelines are categorised by circular strategy, and it is therefore recommended to first use the Circular Strategies Scanner in order to identify strategies that are relevant for the product.

Along with the guidelines are also case examples for circular product development for each of the circular strategies.


How to apply it?

The guidelines should be used in the product development in the following steps:

Step 1
Go through the whole set of guidelines

Step 2
Go through guidelines for strategies that are found to be relevant

Step 3
Prioritize which guidelines are important to implement into the product design

Step 4
Identify correlations, contradictions and trade-offs between the guidelines and between guidelines and other product requirements

Step 5
Place the identified guidelines in the product development process using sticky notes

Step 6
Use the guidelines to create and refine the concepts

Step 7
Try out the Circularity Assessment Tool, to evaluate how well relevant guidelines have been implemented into the product design


When to apply the tool?

The guideline framework both contains general and detailed guidelines and they can hereby be used in multiple stages of the early product development.

The Guidelines for Circular Product Development is one of the tools presented in the CIRCit project to help in Circular Product Development (WB3). Read more about the results of this focus area, explore other tools which can help in developing circular products and download the inspiring workbook here.

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