New Horizon Europe project supports circular innovation in the furniture sector
Despite strong EU-level efforts to foster circularity, the European furniture sector continues to face persistent barriers to its transition. Downstream market challenges, including high costs for repair and storage, limited trust in second-hand furniture, and a lack of transparency, continue to constrain the uptake of circular practices and therefore favour linear and fast furniture models. These barriers, combined with new regulatory pressures and requirements such as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and Digital Product Passports (DPP), may increase compliance costs and perceived investment risks, thereby slowing the adoption of circular business models. Addressing these challenges requires coordinated, ecosystem-level innovation.
One such initiative is CIRCOLINK, a new Horizon Europe–funded project in which Assistant Professor Abel Diaz Gonzalez plays a leading role. Maastricht University School of Business and Economics (SBE) has received a prestigious Horizon Europe grant as part of the international research project CIRCOLINK – Circular Revolution through Collaborative LINKs in Furniture Ecosystems. The project will officially start on 1 October 2026 and will run for 36 months.
CIRCOLINK was selected through a highly competitive Horizon Europe call, with only two projects funded out of 35 submissions, representing an approximate success rate of 6 per cent. The project aims to support the circular transition of the European furniture sector by developing and testing innovative “SHIFTERs”: concrete circular business model pilots implemented across six countries: Italy, Denmark, Poland, Ireland, Austria and the Czech Republic. These pilots are designed to actively engage manufacturers, social enterprises, and public actors within local furniture ecosystems, creating opportunities for collaboration and shared learning. With a total grant of €5 million, CIRCOLINK is coordinated by LUMSA University (Italy) and involves a consortium of 17 partners. The consortium includes universities in Italy, Denmark and Poland, as well as municipalities, social enterprises, and sector organisations from Austria, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
CIRCOLINK is an important research project because it approaches the circular transition as an ecosystem challenge, with social enterprises, an important focus of my research, playing a valuable role alongside industry and public actors in areas such as repair, reuse, and circular value creation. For SBE, this is a strong fit with our work on entrepreneurship, sustainability and research with societal relevance.
Abel Diaz Gonzalez, Assistant Professor in Organization, Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Maastricht University’s School of Business Economics
Within the project, SBE’s Department of Organisation, Strategy and Entrepreneurship (OSE) will play a leading role. Coordinated by Assistant Professor Abel Diaz Gonzalez, the team, together with Professor Juliette Koning and Associate Professor Jolien Huybrechts, will lead one of the project’s seven work packages, focusing on Dissemination and Exploitation. This work package examines how different types of organisations, including mainstream manufacturers and social enterprises, can make circular business models work in practice. A key objective is to translate lessons from the SHIFTER pilots into transferable insights that can support replication, coordination and policy uptake across Europe, while fostering new partnerships with industry and mission-driven organisations.
If you would like to learn more about the project, are working on related research, or are interested in exploring opportunities for collaboration, please email us; we would be glad to hear from you.
Also read
-
Honouring heritage, embracing hospitality: SBE alumna Yinyin’s story
When Yinyin (SBE Alumna) walks through the doors of her restaurant on the weekend, she is not just an owner checking on operations. She is also a project manager, a strategist, a sister, and an entrepreneur balancing two very different worlds.
-
Owners of family businesses often lack adequate preparation for their role
Owners of family businesses feel they are insufficiently prepared for their role. While succession planning regarding management or employee positions within the family business is carefully discussed, attention to future ownership and the associated responsibilities is often lacking.
-
DigiMach: digitisation for SMEs
Digitisation is becoming more and more important, including for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). DigiMach is a Euregional innovation project designed to help smaller companies in the metal sector move forward with digitisation. Maastricht University is one of the partners.
