Henry Chesbrough is a leading innovation scholar at both UC Berkeley and Luiss University in Rome. He is best known for his research on open innovation, and is now working with leading companies in both Europe and the US to incorporate sustainability into their innovation practices. He is excited about the CircularX project, and eager to learn from the activities within the project.
Dr. Marian Chertow is a professor of industrial environmental management at the Yale University School of the Environment and the Director of the Center for Industrial Ecology. She is also appointed at the Yale School of Management and the National University of Singapore. Her research and teaching focus on industrial ecology, business/environment issues, circular economy, and waste management. She is on the Boards of Terracycle US, Inc. and the Alliance for Research in Corporate Sustainability and is an advisor to Trane Technologies, Inc. In April 2020 she was appointed as a Member of the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) Expert Panel on Circular Economy in Canada.
Wei-Qiang Chen is a professor of Resources and Urban Sustainability Sciences at the Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He received his bachelor and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Environment at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and was working at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies during 2010-2015. His research focuses on the (1) environmental system analysis and sustainable engineering, (2) urban metabolism and urban complexity, and (2) anthropogenic cycles and trade of resources, especially metals and plastics, and their implications for circular economy. His studies have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Environmental science and Technology, and other first-level journals. He was elected to the board of the International Society for Industrial Ecology in 2018 and was the founding president of the Chinese Society for Industrial Ecology built in 2015. He is now serving as associate editor for the journals Resources, Conservation, and Recycling and Journal of Industrial Ecology.
I am professor of innovation and sustainable development at the Maastricht Sustainability Institute of Maastricht University and professorial fellow at UNU-MERIT, a research institute of United Nations University and Maastricht University. I have worked and published on energy issues, mobility, waste, innovation policy, environmental policy and sustainability science. The last 6 years, I have worked on the circular economy, urban labs and social innovation.
I am an expert of sustainability transitions, a field which I helped to establish. Within this field, I wrote seminal articles on transition experiments, co-evolution and transition managements.
Arnold Tukker is the Professor of Industrial Ecology and Scientific director of the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML, 130 staff) at Leiden University. He retains a small position at the Dutch not for profit research organization TNO. Arnold set up 15 million Euro in EU projects in which the world’s most ambitious and detailed global energy/resource/economic input-output database (EXIOBASE) was built. He leads a EU Marie Curie Innovative Training Network of 15 PhDs researching the circular economy (Circ€uit). He was appointed as a member of the European Academy of Sciences in 2018, and recognised by the Web of Science group as a highly cited researcher in November 2019. His work in the field of sustainable business models is among the highest cited globally.
Ilka Weissbrod, PhD, is a Postdoc of Innovation and Strategy in Sustainability Management at the Leuphana Universität of Lüneburg. 10 years as innovation advisor to international companies large and small and her PhD work at Imperial College London are the foundation of her research themes: business experimentation for sustainability, sustainable entrepreneurship, operationalisation of the Circular Economy approach, sustainable business models, and urgency of implementing sustainability-oriented innovation. Ilka is closely involved with business practice through research projects, and in speaker and advisory roles.
Team Leader, Principal Scientist, VTT Logo & Maria’s photo attached. Bio: Maria works as Team Leader & Principal Scientist at VTT. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Tampere University, specialising in innovation in business networks. She leads scientific work and excellence development in Circular Business Models at VTT. In specific, her research focuses on business model innovation, business model experimentations and consumer-driven services in the context of the Circular Economy. She has been leading and involved in multiple projects related to the CE (national and EU). She is a certified and experienced project manager (IPMA, Level C) and active publisher of her scientific work working as a reviewer in several academic journals and conferences.
Kes McCormick is an Associate Professor at the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE) at Lund University, Sweden as well as an Honorary Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI) at Melbourne University, Australia. Heworks in the fields of sustainability, governance, cities and greening the economy. He is the program coordinator for Sharing Cities Sweden (Swedish Innovation Agency) – a national program for the sharing economy in cities. He is also a member of the management teams for Naturvation (Horizon 2020) and Transform (Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), and an active participant in Viable Cities on Smart and Sustainable Cities (Swedish Energy Agency).
Brendan is the Director of Circular Economy at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. He co-developed and oversees Factor10, WBCSD’s flagship circular economy project, convening 35+ companies from over 15 industries. Since joining WBCSD, Brendan has authored or contributed to over 15 publications, contributed to the establishment of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste and oversaw the delivery of the Circular Transition Indicators. Brendan has an MBA from the Yale School of Management, a Master of Environmental Management from the Yale School of the Environment and a B.A. in Ecological Design from the University of California Santa Cruz.
Frank Boons Director of the Sustainable Consumption Institute Professor of Innovation and Sustainability Defra Academic Fellow (resources and waste) in the CSAO Systems Research Programme University of Manchester Frank Boons is an economic sociologist who has contributed to the field of environmental sciences on the topics of contested technological change, responsible innovation and the governance of material and energy flows. He has specialised in systemic and processual approaches to analysis and policy advice. In addition to his publications on these topics, he has held editorial roles at the Journal of Cleaner Production and the Journal of Industrial Ecology. His current research interestis is in how economies transition to become more sustainable, with increased circulation as one possible pathway.
