Product Tonic Lab Meetup #9 — Economy

Albert Hardy
Product Team Tonic
Published in
2 min readDec 6, 2021

“How might we use product skill set in pushing economies into the green circle of the doughnut economy?”

What we learnt:

  • Understanding doughnut economics and current challenges
  • Having a more sustainable mindset

The Doughnut Theory

The Doughnut theory offers a vision of what it means for humanity to thrive in the 21st century. Three things about the Doughnut:

  • Contains social and ecological topics
  • Goal is to live in the green zone
  • Seven ways to think differently:
  1. Changing the Goal
  2. See the big picture
  3. Nurture human nature
  4. Get savvy with systems
  5. Design to distribute
  6. Create to regenerate
  7. Be agnostic about growth

Moving from linear to circular economy

Ecological degradation is the result of degenerative industrial process. The economy needs to move from a linear to a circular system and work within the cycle of the living world.

Sustainable Design Strategies examples :
Modularity, Product Service Systems Models, Longevity, Remanufacture, Recyclability, Repairability, Reusability, etc.

Emerging questions :

  • HMW shift our mindset to reuse than consume new things?
  • HMW create infrastructure and incentives around it?
  • How we want to incentivized user to be proactively reuse/recycle their goods
  • A lot of consumer product business models rely on continuous consumption — HMW change this “thinking” to incentivize businesses to create longer lasting, more BIFL (buy-it-for-life) products?

Side Quest

Attributions

This is a personal summary notes for Product Tonic Labs 2021 that took place from April — Nov 2021

Product Tonic Lab is open source

This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). This work is derivative of Prime/OS, Theory U concepts, #ProductBeer, #ProductTonic and The Collab Folks (TCF) “The Learning Circle v1-v3” and “TCF v1-v5.5”.

Materials in Product Tonic Meetups

This work is based on “The Collab Folks”, Cactus team and many sources.

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