DEALING WITH “DATA VOIDS” IN EMERGENT CIRCULAR BUSINESSES

Paper in proceeding, 2025

Circular business efforts, such as recycling, increasingly rely on interdependent digital technologies, including IoT, open data, big data analytics, and automation. These digital technologies typically require advanced infrastructure and existing data that can be aggregated, moved, and morphed for different purposes. Yet what happens when the infrastructure is there, but the data points are unavailable or irrelevant? What are the processes of data requirement gathering when there is a mismatch between the selected infrastructure and the data? This paper explores how an ecosystem of circular businesses created their own data commons and, in turn, filled the existing data voids. Using a case study approach involving multiple sources of data collection, we present a process of “data commons curation.” We show how this process involved three key phases - collective imagination, data collection, and digital mediation. By theorizing about “data voids,” our study contributes to the growing research on data in the circular economy.