Value-Access-Process: The Framework That Actually Helps You Design a Circular Business Model
- Apr 2
- 6 min read
There is no shortage of circular economy frameworks. The 10R framework, the Butterfly framework, the Value Hill: they are all valuable, well thought-through, and important contributions to how we think about making our economy more circular. If you work in sustainability, you have probably encountered at least one of them.
But here is the thing. When a client sits across from us and asks how to build a circular business model for their children's toy line, their car tires, or their heavy machinery, these frameworks only get us so far.
Yes, you can use the 10Rs to walk through each stage of a product's life cycle and define what an ideal, circular world would look like. And that is a genuinely useful exercise. But there is a massive gap between the ideal circular world and the world we actually operate in. A gap filled with supply chain realities, consumer behavior, competitive dynamics, material constraints, and business economics. What we need are not solutions optimized for circularity in a vacuum. We need solutions that take the idiosyncrasies of the customer, the producer, and the materials seriously.
In my view, this is one of the core reasons why circular economy adoption is so frustratingly slow. All the knowledge is out there. Circularity is, in most cases, the only rational long-term decision for both economic and political decision makers. And yet the adoption numbers are so low. The answer to that is multi-faceted, for sure. But within our own circle of influence, we are convinced that a big part of it comes down to this: we need to do a much better job at developing circular business models that are actually appealing and self-reinforcing. And for that, none of the frameworks mentioned above was cutting it for us.
The Value-Access-Process Framework
A few years ago, I completed the "Strategies for a Circular Economy" certificate course at INSEAD. It was one of the more impactful things I have done professionally in this space. Throughout the course I got to know Atalay Atasu, Professor at INSEAD and co-director of the INSEAD Business Sustainability Programme. In July 2021, Atasu co-authored an article in the Harvard Business Review titled simply "The Circular Business Model." I recommend reading it. In it, he introduced a framework that has since become one of our go-to tools: the Value-Access-Process (VAP) framework.
The core idea is straightforward: Before you design a circular business model for any product, you need to honestly assess three dimensions: the value embedded in the product, how accessible that product is after its first use cycle, and how technically feasible it is to recover that value once you have the product back.
Let's walk through each one.
Value: What Is Actually Worth Recovering?
The first question the VAP framework asks is deceptively simple: what is this product actually worth, and to whom?
Atasu breaks this down into three types of value. Embedded value is the value of the materials themselves. Recoverable value is everything above and beyond the materials: the brand, the functionality, the residual performance of a product that has been well maintained. And preemptive value is forward-looking: value created by upcoming regulations, anticipated material scarcity, or shifting market expectations.
Understanding which of these applies to your product is the first step toward figuring out whether a circular model even makes business sense, and if so, which kind.
Access: Can You Actually Get the Product Back?
This is where the framework sometimes gets counter-intuitive if you come from a more systemic perspective.
The instinct is to think: if there is a lucrative secondary market for the product, this is a great sign for circularity - we are doing it right! While that is true from a systemic perspective, there is a twist: the existence of a lucrative secondary market is actually one of the worst starting points for a producer-led circular business model.
Why?
Because if there is a thriving secondhand market for your product, you are competing with that market to get your own products back. Customers have better options than returning the product to you. They can sell it. And often they will.
Other questions like ease of return, how bulky is the product? Can it be sent back by post or does it require a freight truck? Is there a collection infrastructure in place? Do consumers actually want to participate? All of that feeds into the “Access “ Score.
This is the kind of insight that sounds obvious in hindsight but gets missed constantly in practice. The VAP framework forces you to face it.
Process: What Happens Once You Have It Back?
The third dimension is the most technical one. Assuming you can get the product back, how much of its value can you actually recover? How easy is it to recondition, repair, dismantle, or repurpose? And critically: how much potential for improvement is there in the process technology, and what would it cost to capture that potential?
While you look at what is possible today, it is even more important to assess where the technology is heading and whether the investment in getting there makes strategic sense.
Mapping It All: The APV Matrix
Once you have worked through all three dimensions and quantified them as honestly as you can, you map your product onto the APV matrix. The matrix plots products along two axes: how hard or easy product access is, and how hard or easy the recovery process is. Value shows up as a third dimension within each cell.
The result is a taxonomy of circularity starting points. Tires land in hard access, hard process. Wind turbines are high value but similarly hard on both dimensions. Consumer electronics have relatively easy access but a hard recovery process. You could argue scrap metals sit in the most favorable quadrant: easy access, easy process.
What makes this so useful is that it is not a framework for how the world should work but rather a framework for how your product actually sits in the world right now. It gives you a realistic circularity assessment rooted in market and business reality.
What We Built on Top of It
After encountering this framework for the first time in the HBR article (linked below), we started applying it. We assessed products across a wide range of industries and kept refining our understanding of what the dimensions really mean in practice.
Over time, we built our own assessment tool: a guided, interview-structured way to work through an APV assessment systematically. And most importantly, we developed a set of strategies to help companies move from wherever they sit in the APV matrix toward a viable circular business model.
We call them First-Order and Second-Order Circularity Measures.
First-order measures are the things a company can do on its own, in the shorter term. Design for recycling. Optimizing for circular input, retained product ownership or building targeted partnerships. These are moves that do not require systemic change but can meaningfully shift your position in the matrix.
Second-order measures are more ambitious and collaborative. They involve investing in process innovation for product life extension and resource recovery but also building up collection infrastructure. They require working across organizational boundaries and often across industry boundaries. They take longer and cost more, but they are where the most significant competitive advantages tend to emerge.
Why This Helped Us
As I see it, the VAP framework does not replace the 10Rs or the Butterfly model. Those frameworks are doing something different and doing it well. But when it comes to the moment where someone needs to make a real decision about a real product in a real market, they need something that starts with reality and builds toward circularity, not the other way around. And it is why, out of everything we have encountered in this space, it has become the foundation of how we approach circular business model development. If you want to learn more about our assessment tool or the circularity measures we have developed, get in touch. We are always happy to talk.
Written by Felix Ambros
Sources:
INSEAD Knowledge article https://knowledge.insead.edu/responsibility/circular-economy-enthusiasm-realism
Harvard Business Review article: "The Circular Business Model", July–August 2021 issue https://hbr.org/2021/07/the-circular-business-model
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