Circular Economy (CE) and sustainability are getting high on the political agenda of governments on the global level. Businesses and supply chains are at the heart of that transition, and need to make big steps in the coming years for making the transition from a linear model of make-use-dispose towards a circular model. For this transition, financing plays a key role. Financial institutions operate in a highly regulated environment. In this context, we see two particular, yet complementary, areas where digital infrastructures can be of value to support this transition. They can (1) help the financial institutions gather data about supply chain operations and address the performance of financial instruments used for the green and circular transition (i.e. bottom-up, micro view); and (2) help regulators monitor the activities of financial institutions to ensure that provided financing is indeed used to stimulate circular supply chains (i.e. top-down, macro view). In this paper, we explore the scene for digital infrastructure deployment for CE monitoring when it comes to CE funding, and propose a framework and a research agenda on the topic.@en

Our society is facing big challenges and public organizations have a key role in addressing these, as well as providing public funding for innovation. Many innovation projects however result in a proof-of-concept and deliver initial results but experience issues with upscaling further to realize impact. In the EU, innovation networks are emerging to steer promising innovations towards upscaling and implementation to realize impact. Managing multiple innovation trajectories towards implementation and impact, and allocating funds and other instruments to stimulate the upscaling process is not straightforward. In this paper we propose a process model that can be used as a high-level framework to manage multiple innovation trajectories. The model is developed in the context of the PEN-CP innovation network for customs professionals. Theoretically it builds upon and extends earlier research on upscaling collective innovations.

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