Today it looks like a widely accepted fact: the world is changing rapidly. Population is growing, economy is developing and knowledge gains ground everywhere, with, however, widening inequalities. Technological revolutions do occur at a high pace; air, water and soil pollution is invasive; natural resources are over-exploited; common goods are under pressure of capitalistic commodification; Planet Earth is suffering; biodiversity is threatened; human life is full of unfair and growing imbalances. Philosophical conceptions of action, political thinking and its resulting social institutions’ management, as well as current socioeconomic handling in public or private spheres seem no more able to shape the frame of life in its diversity and in a satisfactory manner for all. “Something” looks wrong. In the high interconnected and complex environment we are living in, this condition does not seem easy to change rapidly. But a paradigmatic change appears urgently needed. Comments about this are numerous, just to cite a few: “We need a holistic economic model” (Brown 2017); “The new source of competitive differentiation may lie in the internal capacity to reconfigure resources in real time; driving co-created value through global networks ” (Prahalad and Krishnan 2008); “A new ecolegal order is urgently needed.” “Sustainability is not an individual property but a property of an entire web of relationships, and it always involves a whole community” (Capra and Mattei 2015); “The breakaway from linear models obviously applies to tangible resources, but it must also include intangible resources such as knowledge” (Radjou 2017); “We need better business principles” (Hamel 2012). With circular economy we are confronted with “a management revolution that requires a deep rethinking of our economic and managerial system, our lives, and what matters to us, what matters now” (Auerswald 2012).

It is becoming clear that we must learn to live in tune with nature and with one another, that we need a radical paradigmatic change, including sharing and solidarity practices. Application of circular principles may be considered as part of a holistic solution, of a global viable evolution; we try to understand why and how.

The concept of circular economy is rooted in the observation of physical phenomena and natural cycles (Institut Montaigne 2016); it is an old story. As a famous saying attributed to the eighteenth-century French chemist Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier puts it, “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.” This expression was a reformulation of the idea expressed by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Anaxagoras, who commented on nature (around 450 BC), “Nothing comes into existence nor perishes, but is rather compounded or dissolved from things that are.”

However, later on, the concept of “circular” economy became grounded in more narrow terms: in its opposition to the “linear” economy. The latter, a product of the industrial revolution induced by the invention of the steam engine and its rapidly large utilization, relies on the following chain: extraction of raw materials—transformation into a product—consumption of the product—production of waste, or in other words “take–make–use–discard.” The viability of such a model, linked to enormous squandering (and in a context of growing population and limited natural resources) is not “sustainable” in the long run. In some circumstances irreversible damage is done to the environment and its ecosystems. A famous alarm-whistle is the report published by the Club of Rome, 1972, written by Meadows, Donella et al. (1972, MIT), and often called the Meadows report. This scientific large data analysis defends the idea that infinite growth cannot be envisaged in a world of finite resources. Over- and mis-use of natural resources lead to dramatic depletion. Long before, a German administrator at the court of Saxony in charge of the mining industry and forest management, Hans Carl von Carlowitz, wrote a treaty, Sylvicultura oeconomica (1713), (printed again with annotations in 2013) in which he developed the rule that exploitation of natural resources like timber cannot exceed the quantity that nature is able to reproduce, in a given space of time. He argues that this rule is valid even if “good” economic reasons, or even a decision to start a war, are alleged as dubious pretexts. Carlowitz is not well known outside of Germany, but he is considered the first to clearly formulate the concept of sustainability in forestry. Unfortunately, more than two centuries of carelessness followed.

Since the 1960s, in the field of environmental economics and management (Callan and Thomas 2015) both concepts of “sustainability” and “circular economy” are gathering momentum (see for instance Geissdoerfer et al. 2017). These authors do link the two concepts in their recent research question, The Circular Economy—A New Sustainable Paradigm? They state that for “academia, industry and policymakers, the similarities and differences between both concepts remain ambiguous.” Geissdoerfer et al. make reference to several hundreds of definitions! Scott T. Young and K. Kathy Dhanda, in Sustainability: Essentials for Business (2013), a book offering immense understanding of the interaction between the needs of society versus the ecological limits on natural resources, listed more than 500 definitions of sustainability! Some of them are easy to remember, such as the term 3P, which stands for people, planet, and profits; it states that companies need to measure their impacts not only on the bottom line (profits) but also on the community (people) and the environment (planet). In that view, businesses’ responsibility extends to all stakeholders, in all domains of social life and in the long run. This global performance achievement is the core of sustainability, a very ambitious objective for entrepreneurship. Ambitious does not mean impossible. We do think that entrepreneurial initiatives are essential to tackle the huge problem of sustainability because enterprises have—more so than other organizations like international institutions or national states—the capacity to be reactive in a short time and the ability to introduce, in an autonomous way, radical change (at least in a free market economy).

Circular economy, in its classical acceptance, is linked to the idea that waste, once adequately treated, can become a resource again, through the creation of closed circular loops in the production–consumption chain. The diverse schools of thought, in the frame of that thinking (“cradle to cradle,” biomimicry, industrial ecology, blue economy, regenerative design, eco-design, and others) are identified in the well-known British Ellen MacArthur Foundation publications. This foundation goes further and lays out two essential elements of the circular economy: the regeneration and protection of natural capital on the one hand, and efficient use of natural resources on the other. Hence the challenge of the circular economy is to align our human production and consumption cycles with the natural regulatory functions that make up the rate of natural capital regeneration.

Our concern , in this book, is to try to understand what “circular entrepreneurship” is, and especially to decipher why and how the leading decision makers (a person, or a group of decision makers, or a new governance body) decide to get active in environmental management to support sustainability for the present and future generations (famously expressed in the so-called Brundtland Report, in fact a UN World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) Report, 1987. Its message is Sustainable Development is the development that meets t...