Circular ambition is everywhere. Few organisations are ready to deliver it.

Circular Intelligence began with a recurring observation: organisations announced circular ambitions, ran pilots and joined collaborative programmes, but too few of those efforts changed how the organisation actually operated. They did not need another definition of circularity. They needed a way to see whether they could deliver the one they had.

Across different industries the language changed but the pattern held. A company had a circular ambition, a motivated team developed a pilot, external partners were enthusiastic and the first workshop went well. Then progress slowed.

The product was rarely the problem. The organisation surrounding it was often not ready.

The same pattern took many forms: a product redesign with no return system, a material innovation with no committed buyers, a Digital Product Passport with no reliable source data. Elsewhere a circular procurement target sat next to purchasing incentives that still rewarded the lowest short-term price, a supply-chain programme ran without anyone authorised to coordinate it, and a successful pilot ended with no internal owner for what came next.

Circular Intelligence began in the gap between a circular idea and an organisation's ability to deliver it.

Circularity was being treated as an ideas problem

By 2025, most serious organisations were no longer inactive. They had sustainability strategies, circular targets, innovation teams, material-flow studies, design workshops and public commitments. Regulatory pressure was rising and collaborative programmes were multiplying.

A great deal of this activity was organised around producing more ideas: concepts, pilots, challenges, demonstrators, reports. All useful. But another circular idea was not always what the organisation lacked. What was frequently missing was authority, internal alignment, reliable data, operational ownership, commercial logic, or a supply chain willing and able to move at the same time.

The quality of a circular idea and the readiness of the system around it are different things. Much of the circular economy conversation was measuring the first and assuming the second.

What working inside a circular ecosystem made visible

Before founding Circular Intelligence, Alexander Forrest worked on data governance and business development for organisations including Volvo, Henkel, Port of Antwerp and Rijkswaterstaat. He developed circular programmes through CIRCO and value-chain initiatives across plastics, beverages, fibres, hydrogen infrastructure and offshore wind, and worked in the BlueCity ecosystem in Rotterdam, where circular entrepreneurs, established businesses and public partners operate in close contact.

That range mattered, because the same structural problem kept appearing in very different settings.

BlueCity in particular made two things visible at once. First, the power of a dense ecosystem: entrepreneurship, experimentation and cross-sector collaboration genuinely create opportunities that isolated organisations cannot. Second, the limits of individual projects. A strong entrepreneur or a promising technology cannot create a functioning circular system alone. One company's waste only becomes another company's input when specifications, volumes, timing, logistics, economics and responsibility all align. Progress depends on suppliers, buyers, regulators, financiers, data owners and internal decision-makers moving together, and somebody still has to convert connections into coordinated action.

Circularity is usually drawn as a loop. Closing one takes a series of decisions by different people in different organisations.

CircularID revealed the limits of information alone

The first version of this thinking had a different name. In early 2025 the working concept was CircularID, developed under the domain circularid.io. Its focus was product identity and information: Digital Product Passports, traceability, material data, persistent records supported by technologies including blockchain and AI. The underlying question was how a product could retain the information required for it to remain valuable after its first use.

That question is still important. A Digital Product Passport can show what a product contains, where its materials came from, how it can be repaired or disassembled, and what should happen at end of life.

But developing the concept exposed a deeper issue. Better information could not, by itself, make procurement use it, change how operations ran, get finance to approve the investment, make suppliers deliver reliable data, or give anyone in the organisation ownership of the outcome. Someone still has to maintain the information, trust it and act on it, and some organisation has to take the product back when the data shows it is recoverable.

A product can carry perfect information into an organisation that is still unable to act on it.

Information can make circularity visible, but organisational capability determines whether anyone can act on it. That conclusion widened the scope from CircularID to Circular Intelligence. The product-information question did not disappear; it became one part of a larger subject.

The missing subject was readiness

That larger subject needed a name, and the most honest one was readiness: the combination of understanding, authority, capability, evidence and coordination required to turn a circular intention into repeatable action.

Readiness is an assessment of whether the conditions for progress exist. It does not score how much an organisation cares, and it does not replace lifecycle assessment or material-flow analysis.

It is worth separating two things that were routinely conflated. Circular potential is whether an idea, product or material flow could theoretically become circular. Circular readiness is whether the organisation and its partners have the conditions required to make that potential operational. An organisation can hold a technically strong solution, a clear environmental benefit and a convincing pilot, and still be unable to scale, because it lacks shared understanding, decision ownership, credible investment logic, reliable data, or a defined route from experimentation to normal business.

The practical readiness questions are unglamorous: whether the organisation agrees on what circularity means here, whether the objective is connected to the business strategy, who owns the outcome, whether finance can evaluate the investment and operations can implement it, whether suppliers will participate, and whether progress survives the departure of the original champion.

Why Circular Intelligence was started

Circular Intelligence was created to help organisations see the conditions around their circular ambitions before committing more money, time and leadership attention to solutions the organisation is not yet equipped to scale.

Its founding proposition: before asking an organisation to do more circular work, understand what is stopping the circular ambition it already has. Different organisations stall for different reasons, and a standard solution applied to the wrong constraint creates more work without creating movement.

The role is deliberately a transition one. It comes after broad ambition and before major implementation, between strategy and operations, and between circular entrepreneurs and the organisations that might adopt their solutions. It is not a replacement for engineers, lifecycle-assessment specialists, technology providers or certification bodies. Its job is to help determine which expertise is needed, at what moment, for which barrier, and on what organisational foundation.

Success shows up as movement rather than reports. Teams share the same understanding of the objective. Responsibility moves from an individual champion into the organisation. Finance holds enough evidence to assess the case, data gaps surface before compliance deadlines instead of after, and a pilot has a defined route to scale. A region moves from networking to coordinated market activity, and the circular activity continues after the original programme ends.

The objective is not to produce more circular activity. It is to improve the proportion of circular activity that becomes durable.

A developing method, not a finished doctrine

One idea in development is a structured diagnostic, the Circular Index: a facilitated, possibly game-based way to compare how different teams think the organisation stands on strategic alignment, leadership support, cross-functional collaboration, data readiness, investment readiness and the ability to move from pilot to scale. Its purpose is to expose the largest readiness gaps and start action, not to produce a final score.

The exact dimensions and scoring approach are still being tested, and the language will keep evolving through practical work. What would later become the Circular Readiness Levels began as a more basic question: why could two organisations with similar ambitions achieve completely different results?

The essential question, however, is already clear. What needs to become true inside an organisation, and across its ecosystem, before this circular ambition can work?

Intelligence before intervention

The circular transition does not lack ingenuity. It contains promising materials, technologies, business models, policies and entrepreneurs. What it frequently lacks is an honest understanding of the system into which those solutions are being introduced.

Before another pilot is launched, another platform purchased or another target announced, an organisation should be able to answer a handful of questions. What is currently blocking movement? Is the problem technical or organisational? Who owns the next decision? What evidence is missing? Which partners must move together? What would allow this activity to continue without exceptional individual effort?

Circular Intelligence was created to help answer those questions.

Circular ambition says where an organisation wants to go. The prior question is whether it can get there.

Start with the blockage

Circular programmes usually need clarity before they need more activity. We help organisations find where progress is stuck and what has to change before the next investment.