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Liv Andersson is a Circular Design Expert & Project Lead at Stena Circular Consulting.

Product-as-a-Service is a critical business model to enable the circular economy transition. It offers a tangible opportunity for companies to reduce their dependence on new resources and achieve their sustainability goals. By enabling and incentivising resource-efficient operations and the use of durable products, Product-as-a-Service business models help to keep materials and products in use for longer. The company retains ownership of the product, this enables control of product maintenance, repair, and end-of-life management. Rather than paying for product ownership, customers pay for access to the product’s function or for a specific outcome.
Despite its potential to provide a strong competitive advantage and improve sustainability, PaaS has not been implemented at the pace many predicted. In partnership with Cradlenet (a leading circular economy network), we identified nine key challenges that companies face when transitioning to PaaS and what they can do to address them.
View our PaaS report to understand the challenges and how your business can overcome them.
With a strong understanding of the challenges, we explored the support and tools needed to accelerate the transition to Product-as-a-Service business models. Working with pioneering companies, we developed a robust methodology and toolbox to enable businesses to identify their PaaS advantage and support their transition.
Depending on the readiness of your organisation, the toolbox can be used to get a sense of what a Product-as-Service offering would mean for your business or to start developing and implementing a Product-as-a-Service business model.
For the latter, we recommend forming a diverse working group, which should include product management, sustainability, finance, and the customer perspective, and using an impartial facilitator to work through each of the 4 steps in turn.
Our tried and tested Product-as-a-Service Toolbox enables companies to understand their growth opportunities and the competitive advantage provided by service-based business models. It also provides practical steps and guidance to identify and overcome key challenges in the transition.
The open-source toolbox is broken into 4 key steps.

Liv Andersson is a Circular Design Expert & Project Lead at Stena Circular Consulting.

The report and methodology has been developed as a part of the project "Service-based business models - transition to PaaS in practice" funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).