King's College London launches ecology-inspired toolkit for circular economy innovation. Researchers at King’s Business School have developed Nature’s Playbook, a card-based toolkit that uses ecological principles as design prompts to help businesses generate circular economy ideas. The tool is based on four years of doctoral research into ecological thinking in business innovation.
The toolkit uses a three-step process in which participants select a card describing an ecological phenomenon, such as how ecosystems maintain balance or adapt to change, and relate it to a business challenge. Pilot workshops with participants from retail, consulting, manufacturing and the public sector found the approach helped teams reframe how materials, products and processes could be reused rather than discarded. King’s College London says the project has been selected for its SPARK Innovation Fund, which will fund international expansion and a Mandarin translation ahead of a presentation at Shanghai Fashion Week’s Circular Transformation Summit.
