Chris Rudolph (M.A.)

Business Designer

Chris helps corporations to build a circular innovation strategy, deep-dive into cleantech best practice, kickstart innovation programs for circular products and create performance-based business models.

“I create circular businesses and show big organizations how to do it.”
Chris is a senior business designer and circular economy expert. In more than ten years of practical consulting work in the field of innovation and strategy he helped industry clients analyze their value propositions for future viability and embed their business models in a long-term resilient strategy. Today he initiates change processes towards circular economy thinking and facilitates projects teams in processes of innovation foresight and creating product-service-systems.

With an academic background in corporate management and economics his primary focus is in the field of sustainable innovation and strategy foresight. Despite his economics background, Chris is a generalist researching in the fields of complexity studies, ecology and organizational design.

Chris is an expert in B2B Lean Innovation for industrial clients and accompanied many new players and incumbents in early stage business development. Since 2009 he has been involved in numerous innovation projects with corporations such as Philips Design, Audi, Ernst & Young, BASF or Fairphone. He worked as a circular economy expert with Z_punkt GmbH – The Foresight Company and (academic) institutions including Europe’s biggest innovation learning program Climate KIC.

He also served as a pro- bono business plan advisor for the State of Lower Saxony in Hannover and co-organized the state’s biggest conference (Lab) for Lean Startups. In 2015 he was appointed Pitch Juror in Europe’s first startup prize for the circular economy (Green Alley), a Seedmatch partner.

Recent Publications

Rudolph C. (2018) Geschäftsmodell Circular Economy: Gegenwart und Zukunft der (erweiterten) Kreislaufwirtschaft. In: Bungard P. (eds) CSR und Geschäftsmodelle. Management-Reihe Corporate Social Responsibility. Springer Gabler, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-52882-2_7

Recent Writings