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The circular economy (CE), and its focus on the cycling and regeneration of resources, necessitates both a reconfiguration of existing infrastructures and the creation of new infrastructures to facilitate these flows. In urban settings, CE is being realized at multiple levels, from within individual organizations to across peri-urban landscapes. While most attention in CE research and practice focuses on organizations, the scale and impact of many such efforts are limited because they fail to account for the diversity of resources, needs, and power structures across cities, consequently missing opportunities for adopting a more effective and inclusive CE. Reconfiguring hard infrastructures is necessary for material resource cycling, but intervening in soft infrastructures is also needed to enable more inclusive decision-making processes to activate these flows. Utilizing participatory action research methods at the intersection of industrial ecology and design, we developed a new framework and a model for considering and allocating the variety of resources that organizations utilize when creating value for themselves, society, and the planet. We use design prototyping methods to synthesize distributed knowledge and co-create hard and soft infrastructures in a multi-level case study focused on urban food producers and farmers markets from the City of Chicago. We discuss generalized lessons for "infrastructuring" the circular economy to bridge niche-level successes with larger system-level changes in cities.

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Abstract:The discovery (or creation) of entrepreneurial opportunities is a crucial starting point of the entrepreneurial process, yet, the process remains casual and sloppy. There are many similarities between the front-end of the new product development process and the front-end of the entrepreneurial process. Although many authors acknowledge creativity as an important factor in the generation of entrepreneurial opportunities, none of them acknowledges any contribution from design. When creative capabilities are used at the front-end of innovation, aspiring entrepreneurs can be more productive because design approaches enable entrepreneurs to be pro-active, consistent and reliable, rather than just exploratory and reactive. Design, especially service design, possesses instruments that allow for the framing, development, co-designing and prototyping of complex intangible projects thus potentially being a powerful ally to entrepreneurs. The purpose of this article is to postulate the use of a set of service design tools as creative capabilities for empowering aspiring entrepreneurs in the front-end of the entrepreneurial process to frame, create, develop and assess business ideas, potentially turning them into entrepreneurial opportunities and posit the use of design strategies and instruments in the front-end of the entrepreneurial process.Keywords: entrepreneurial design; entrepreneurial opportunities; service design; front-end of innovation; FEI; business innovation.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Mata García, L., Deserti, A. and Teixeira, C. (2017) Fellow from 2009 to 2011 in a financed project that aimed at sparking design-driven innovation in small-medium enterprises (SMEs) in the Mantua province, Italy. During her five-year experience as a researcher for Politecnico di Milano, her research interests were focused on advanced design, design futures, design for SME's, service design and design entrepreneurship. She obtained her Doctoral degree in 2014 with a dissertation on the role of design as aid to identify entrepreneurial opportunities. She currently works in Madrid, Spain as a Design Researcher for an international design consultancy firm. Alessandro Deserti is a full Professor of Product Design in Politecnico diMilano, where he teaches at the Design School, and was the Chair of the Product and Furniture Design Programs. He is a member of the design and culture research group in the Design Department, where his research is focused on the processes and the tools for design-driven innovation. He has worked on applied research and consultancy for numerous international companies and institutions, coordinating projects at different levels. He has published several books, essays, and scientific papers, primarily dealing with the relation between design and innovation.Carlos Teixeira is an Associate Professor of Design and Management at the School of Design Strategies, at Parsons The New School for Design. He received his PhD in Design from the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of T...