Program

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Business Strategy & Innovation

Tuesday, June 18th, 2019

8:00am to 12:15pm

Circularity Summit: Packaging and Brand Integrity (Invite-Only)

Summit

Minnesota Room

A growing number of consumer brands are exploring new packaging types, whether in response to direct pressures or in pursuit of new business models and revenue streams. But doing so is not without peril. First and foremost, companies must maintain their brand integrity and value proposition while they tweak or transform one of their principal assets: their branded packaging. In this half-day, invitation-only event, representatives from the plastics and packaging value chains, along with leading packaged goods companies, will explore the promise and pitfalls for brands seeking to transition packaging to circular materials and models.

Request an invite to the summit here.

8:30am to 12:15pm

Circular Packaging 101

Tutorial

Wayzata Bay

The Sustainable Packaging Coalition will traverse the most important considerations around recovering packaging, ensuring packaging is recoverable, and using recovered materials as inputs for new packaging in the Circular Packaging 101 workshop. With a keen emphasis on the business case for sustainable packaging and consumer perceptions around sustainable packaging, we'll discuss best-in-class examples of strategies to optimize packaging for different channels, designing a package to be successfully recycled or composted, and best practices for sourcing virgin and recycled materials. To put it all in context, we'll explore challenges and opportunities around recycling and composting infrastructure, as well as what happens when waste escapes collection and becomes ocean pollution. Throughout the workshop, we'll touch on corporate goals around each topic and look at both incremental and radical approaches to reaching them.

The Amazing Race (to Circular Business Models): Insights from the Fashion Industry

Tutorial

St. Croix 2

There is race among apparel and footwear companies, with both new and established players vying to unlock the potential benefits of circular business models. The insights generated in the process can help inform broader innovation across many other industries in a transition to a circular economy.

Join this tutorial to learn how the fashion industry’s experience illustrates key elements in building a circular business model. Participants will be invited to take part in a fun, interactive competition to better understand the challenges and opportunities companies face when testing and scaling new models.

Facilitated by World Resources Institute (WRI) and QSA Partners, the session will review the innovations needed to overcome an “implementation gap” between talk and testing. WRI and QSA will share early insights on behalf of a group of organizations—supported by C&A Foundation’s Bridging the Gap initiative—working with fashion industry leaders to put circular economy ideas into action.

(No experience in the fashion industry necessary. Only shirts and shoes required.)

Foundations of the Circular Economy

Tutorial

St. Croix 1

This half-day tutorial, designed for attendees from all sectors and backgrounds and presented by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, will provide a foundational understanding of the circular economy — a model that fundamentally reimagines the traditional “take-make-waste” linear industrial model in favor of a system that designs out waste and pollution, decouples economic growth from natural resource consumption, increases resource productivity and regenerates natural systems.

The first part of the tutorial session will tour through our circular economy journey to date. From theory through to action, The Foundation team will start by explaining the guiding principles and then take participants through a series of case study examples which illustrate circular design spanning products, business models, and system level innovations.

To some, the circular economy concept can feel academic and detached from reality. The second part of the session will take a more in depth look at how we can 'sell in' and convince stakeholders to invest in circular economy initiatives. Much of the work concentrating on the circular economy to date has centred on deep analysis of the broader economic opportunity. Translating the theory into practical opportunities for colleagues working at the coal-face of operations, or executives faced with competing priorities, can present a critical challenge.

Fortunately, the circular economy is a big idea with many entry points. Significant work has already been completed by many diverse organisations of all sizes to demonstrate that the theoretical upside can be translated to real commercial opportunities today. Some of these organisations are already taking giant leaps towards circular economy models.

8:30am to 10:00am

Target Field Tour (Sign-up required)

Activity

Join us for a tour of Target Field! During your guided 90-minute tour of Target Field, you'll see areas of the ballpark many guests normally don't see. These spaces may include the Herb Carneal Press Box, clubhouse, dugout, suite level, Bat & Barrel, Delta SKY360 Club, Budweiser Roof Deck, and Thompson Reuters Champions Club. Guests will be exposed to the art work, displays of memorabilia, environmental and sustainability features of Target Field, as well as Twins history. Sign up for the tour here.

4:00pm to 5:00pm

Now What? Unpacking Product Takeback

Breakout

Wayzata Bay

Voluntary product take-back schemes are an effective way for companies to reduce waste, engage consumers, reclaim valuable materials and establish a more circular supply chain. But once a company has successfully recovered a product at the end of its usable life, what next? Join reverse logistics and take-back experts from IKEA, I:CO and Best Buy for a conversation about how to determine the appropriate path for used products that keeps materials at their highest and best use, complies with health and safety regulations and also pencils out.

How to Message the Circular Economy

Breakout

St. Croix 1

As more companies commit to innovative circular economy and sustainability strategies and investments, there is an increased need to learn the best practices for successfully communicating these decisions externally. Too often, we hear about what circular approaches companies are taking but not how they are communicating the relevance of those approaches. This session will explore how companies can most effectively communicate to their customers and stakeholders about their circular ambitions, products, and service offerings by focusing on circular solution(s) and the accompanying communications approaches they employed.

Cultural Conditions for Circularity

Breakout

Spring Park Bay

What if the limitations to realizing a circular economy lay not only in new and innovative approaches, but also in enabling cultural conditions critical for them to take hold? What if, in our quest for more, better, faster, prettier, newer… we lost the thread between who we are and what is happening around us? What if the role of business needs to start, not just with circular practices, but with designing for connection between people? These are some of the questions we are exploring as we consider how to design for the the cultural conditions for a circular economy - be it within cities, neighborhoods, businesses or for a given product or service. Please join IDEO and Gehl as we navigate the human potential within and for the circular economy.

Wednesday, June 19th, 2019

8:30am to 9:30am

Understanding and Engaging Consumers

Breakout

Excelsior Bay

During this interactive session, delegates from GreenBiz, GlobeScan, Danone, IKEA, P&G and WWF will share and discuss fresh insights from recent stakeholder and consumer research conducted around the world. Hear what the results mean for major B2C brands and understand the implications for shifting consumer behavior.

Getting Budget and Demonstrating Value: Partnering with Finance to Overcome Functional Silos

Breakout

Spring Park Bay

One of the compelling aspects of the circular economy is that it creates a clear business case, generating both financial value and environmental benefits. However, demonstrating that value often requires highly cross-functional work. This can make it difficult to get investment, since budgets and ROIs are often done in organizational siloes, and the functions that bear the costs (e.g., reverse logistics) may not directly generate the gains. Finance organizations therefore become a critical partner in finding solutions to successfully gain funding and demonstrate holistic circular economy ROI. This panel will be a practitioner discussion focusing on strategies to enable big, transformational circular investments.

Emerging Trends in Circular Fashion

Breakout

Wayzata Bay

From clothing as a service to digitally enabled tracking to end-of-life recycling, hear how emerging circular business models and products can help break the cycle of fashion waste.

Sell It Again: How Retailers Are Embracing Recommerce

Breakout

Minnesota Room

This session will explore how retailers are using returned consumer products to implement more circular business models through recommerce. Customers return $390B of merchandise annually and return rates for ecommerce purchases can reach 40%. Meanwhile, resale of consumer product (or recommerce) is an 18B market, with online recommerce disruptors growing up >30X faster than traditional retail. This session will focus on how retailers and brands have changed their own business models to adapt to the growing trends around returns and recommerce. You will hear about challenges, successes, and how a move towards circularity is fueling innovations in reverse logistics.

1:30pm to 2:30pm

A More Perfect Circle: Aligning Equity & Circularity

Breakout

Excelsior Bay

Without intention, a circular economy will continue to reinforce the inequity and injustice inherent in the current linear system and communities will be no better off than they were before. However, an economic reimagination will require fundamental changes, which opens up the opportunity to center equity in the new economic model. Join this breakout to hear real-world examples of how circularity can create jobs, mitigate injustice and cultivate resilient local communities.

1:30pm to 3:45pm

Food Vision 2050: Reshaping the Future Food System

Breakout

Wayzata Bay

Many pop culture visions of the future food system are dystopic and disconnected from the land, natural processes, and other human beings. As a response to this crisis, The Rockefeller Foundation is launching the Food System 2050 Vision Prize. This 18-month program will encourage the development of future visions of the global food system that nourish entire populations, protect and regenerate the environment, and enable the flourishing of cultures and communities. These visions will help funders, communities, companies, organizations, and governments identify new opportunities to catalyze change, open a new channel to listen directly to diverse voices across the planet, and translate those visions into practical solutions.

Join SecondMuse for a design thinking session focused on envisioning a desirable future food system for all. Participants of this workshop will be some of the first to help shape the Vision 2050 Prize. Together we will ideate and co-create positive narratives around the future of food and design new models for how to get there. This will be a multi-stakeholder environment interactive session that will provide great opportunities for networking and connecting with top level and emerging leaders in the field and beyond.

Circularity: From Concept to Strategy

Breakout

Minnesota Room

We have all been grappling with the reality of what the circular economy means for our businesses. How do you set a goal around this amorphous concept? What should be the scope of this goal? What is your business’s unique theory of change? And how do you convince your colleagues about the business case for circularity? Join us for a conversation as we dig into these questions and hear from leaders who are turning concept into action, setting goals and then operationalizing circular strategies within businesses across a set of diverse set of industry sectors.

4:15pm to 5:15pm

Artificial Intelligence and the Circular Economy

Breakout

Spring Park Bay

Artificial intelligence can be a valuable tool to help accelerate and scale the transition to a circular economy while creating new forms of value. Given humanity’s inefficient, waste-ridden industrial systems, AI can help solve some complex problems that stand between the current linear system and a more circular one. Hear from companies across industries that are leveraging AI for CE through product and material design, operating new business models and optimizing infrastructure.

Product as Service: PaaS or Fail?

Breakout

St. Croix 1

From lighting fixtures to furniture to clothing and accessories, more companies are exploring models for providing products-as-a-service (PaaS) through rental or leasing arrangements, pay-per-use transactions and subscriptions that reimagine the concept of ownership. What does it take to design and manufacture products that can be “sold” in this manner? What’s the best pricing model? How will this shake up expectations for service and maintenance? And how can companies adapt their own financial models to make this transition? Learn from several organizations at the center of this exciting disruption.

Thursday, June 20th, 2019

8:30am to 9:30am

Storytelling & Consumer Behavior Change

Breakout

Deer & Elk Room

Do you want to get more people buying into circular practices and products? Find out how to use storytelling and behavior change strategies to move your audiences to action — from employees and consumers, to suppliers and buyers. Join this session to learn best practices in storytelling and behavior change from those who’ve used these techniques to advance circularity, sustainability, and social impact for leading businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits. Case studies and research results, combined with dialogue and interactive exercises, will give you a foundation and practical next steps for framing for your story and designing your behavior change campaign.