Strategic development to promote sustainability and circularity challenges incumbents to fundamentally renew their way of doing business. However, the management of this type of strategic development process, that is, strategic renewal aiming at achieving sustainability, remains largely unknown. Therefore, we investigated what constitutes incumbents' strategic renewal aimed at achieving sustainability and how to manage each stage of this process. We conducted a single-case study of the incumbent tech company, Neste Oyj, which is renewing from a fossil-based business to a sustainable and circular business. We analyzed multisourced interview-and document-based data collected from a 25-year longitudinal case study by applying a processual approach and the critical incident technique. We proposed an empirically based process model of business strategy renewal comprising five stages, each of which follows the subprocesses of strategic formulation, implementation, and evaluation. The findings and the process model extend the theoretical understanding of incumbents' business strategy development to achieve sustainability and circularity. The proposed model will enable managers to understand what management issues to focus on and what actions are needed at each stage of the strategic renewal process.

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To implement a circular economy (CE), companies are pushed to innovate, respectively, their business models, from a micro-perspective, and their supply chains, from a meso-perspective. Despite the increasing research on both these perspectives, there is still a knowledge gap on how companies innovate business models and supply chains for circularity. In this study, we build on innovation management, circular business model (CBM), and circular supply chain (CSC) literatures and develop a theory-based framework where circularity leads to product/process/service innovation from a micro-perspective, and to possible innovation in companies’ supply chains (retaining existing chains/renewing them) from a meso-perspective. Through a multiple-case study of Finnish and Italian CE pioneer companies, we validate this framework, find evidence on interplay between CBM and CSC innovation, and identify innovation strategy variants. The framework contributes to innovation management, CBM, and CSC literature works, and encourages managers willing to adopt circularity to consider innovating simultaneously both their business models and supply chains.

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Achieving a circular economy (CE) requires collaboration between diverse stakeholders, which often happens in socio-technical ecosystem settings, where complementary stakeholders can pursue the system-level goal of improving circularity. The stakeholders, as well as the ecosystem settings in which they collaborate, are diverse, which might impact the process of how stakeholders can be engaged in the CE goals. Thus, to achieve CE goals, different stakeholder engagement processes are needed in different ecosystem settings. Bringing together stakeholder engagement, the ecosystem approach, and CE research as our theoretical background, we address the considerable lack of empirical case research on stakeholder engagement processes by analysing six critical topical CE ecosystem cases in Finland: two at the regional level (a local environmental issue and an industrial collaboration), three at the national level (nutrient recycling, the construction sector, and beverage packaging recycling), and one at the global level (a sustainable fast-food business). Based on a detailed case analysis, we conceptualised four stakeholder engagement process archetypes to achieve CE goals. We propose a model that shows how stakeholders are engaged in different CE ecosystem settings depending on the ecosystem structure and the alignment of stakeholder interests with achieving the CE system-level goal. The model and archetypes contribute to the theory and can benefit organisations and managers engaging stakeholders in emerging or established CE ecosystems.