Alicia Marseille, Director of the RISN Incubator, describes how the RISN Incubator uses the Circular Design Guide to advance early state Circular Economy ventures.
The Disruptive Innovation Festival, or DIF, is a three-week long online and open access ideas festival. It seeks to answer the question “What if we could redesign everything?” through three main themes: 21st century economics, the age of automation and the future of design. The festival seeks to inspire attendees from all over the globe to seek innovation with inspiration from the open-source virtual content.
Circular Economy is a major theme in the festival, as is the future of design. The RISN Incubator has integrated the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Circular Design Kit as a primary resource for its early stage ventures. This kit was used to create the Circular Design Challenge – a design based challenge to advance ventures looking to enter the RISN Incubator.
In developing the design challenge, RISN Incubator’s own Veronica Head started with the Circular Design Kit. “It was a little overwhelming at first, I didn’t know where to start” she said. So, she created a map to help guide ventures through the design kit and broke down each workshop into what it addresses. From this, they developed a 12-week program to guide venture through their circular design challenges with the hope that after two workshops and three months of mentorship and resources the ventures will have strengthened their ideas.
To date, four ventures have gone through the Circular Design Challenge and of those, two have already applied to and been accepted into the RISN Incubator. The Circular Design Challenge was also offered as a prize to the five winning teams of the Trash Hack to help students continue working on their circular economy based ventures after the hack. Through the emphasis on circular design, we hope to influence more growth in circular economy and help startups succeed.