When researcher Wierikx at Eindhoven University of Technology analyzed assessments from over 3,000 organizations, a striking gap emerged: companies talk a strong game about circularity, but stumble badly when it comes to making it actually work. The research reveals what many sustainability leaders have quietly suspected—ambitious circular economy goals and real operational change are two very different things.
This matters because the stakes are shifting. The circular economy is no longer just a feel-good environmental story. As supply chains fracture and resource scarcity tightens, firms that fail to develop genuine circular capabilities risk being left vulnerable to disruption and irrelevance. What began as a sustainability concern has become a hard business question: adapt or become exposed to market risk.
The consistent pattern across those thousands of organizational assessments tells the story. "Many firms have embraced circular thinking at a strategic level, but struggle to operationalize it," Wierikx explains. "The transition requires new capabilities, new forms of collaboration, and continuous organizational learning." The problem, he notes, is not a shortage of circular ambitions. It is a shortage of organizational readiness—the actual machinery inside companies that would make those ambitions real.
To help bridge that gap, Wierikx developed the Circular Maturity Tool, a practical, data-driven instrument that measures ten organizational dimensions across four distinct domains: People & Culture, Operations, Strategy & Approach, and Value Chain Collaboration. Unlike typical sustainability frameworks that focus narrowly on environmental outcomes, the tool looks inside organizations themselves—at how firms actually organize their work, their people, and their partnerships to achieve circular goals. Each dimension receives a maturity score ranging from none to regenerative, giving companies a concrete picture of where they stand and where they need to strengthen.
The tool's design reflects a hard truth: scaling circularity is not primarily an engineering problem or an environmental problem. It is an organizational problem. It requires reshaping how people work, how teams collaborate across functions, and how supply chains connect. A firm might have excellent recycling infrastructure but weak internal culture around waste reduction. Another might excel at strategy but lack the cross-company partnerships needed to close material loops.
The research insights are already moving beyond academic papers into practice. Last March, the 2026 edition of "The State of Circular Entrepreneurship"—an annual impact report based on this research—was presented to Queen Máxima at the Circular Entrepreneurship Congress in Utrecht, signaling how seriously the Netherlands is taking circular transformation as both environmental and economic strategy.
For companies feeling stuck between ambition and execution, the message is clear: circularity requires building new internal muscle, not just setting new external goals. It demands rethinking how organizations learn, collaborate, and operate. The Circular Maturity Tool offers a roadmap for that shift—but only for firms ready to do the harder work of actually changing how they work.