Meet Erland Riis Lavsen, Duni Group’s Service Innovation Manager

Today we celebrate World Creativity and Innovation Day, #WCID. This is UN’s day to encourage people to use new ideas, take new decisions, and make the world a better place through creative thinking.

Meet Erland Riis Lavsen, Duni Group’s Service Innovation Manager. Erland is responsible for developing circular business models for Duni Group.

💬 What does innovation mean to you and how can it be translated into a circular business model?

Innovation is for me the result of inventions, crises, regulations, or other change drivers that enables or force us to think differently, to do differently or to offer something quite different. So, innovation represent a pivot from what we are doing today, and thereby it’s different from let’s say optimization.

Innovation doesn’t necessarily need to be a big change, but a significant change of direction, nature, value, or content of what we already have. So, it’s the result of drivers that alters the way we look at things we are used to in a specific way, or make us see new needs for different services, products, or even new systems.

💬 This year’s theme of #WCID is “Collaboration”. How do you work with collaborations in your role?

To create ecosystems – the basic idea behind the circular economy – where materials, products and services are connected to a much higher level than today, we need to collaborate. Collaboration is for me key in circularity. So, to become circular, we all must work together in a new way where each actor involved secure that the circular flows really do become circular.

Ecosystems is simply not a single players game; ecosystems always require collaboration. So, we need to work much closer with our partners, customers, and consumers than ever before – just to be able to establish these ecosystems.

At the same time, even though we have worked on circular economy for more than a decade, we also still need to network to learn from each other and share knowledge. Companies and communities are in general still on a learning journey to fully understand the circular economy.

Collaboration, co-creation and togetherness are therefore core values in the transformation to a more sustainable future for us at Duni Group.

💬 Thank you Erland for sharing!