Performance Economy: Benefitting people, profits and planet

Course Overview

Author: Dr. Walter R. Stahel

Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and fleet managers are key innovators of the Performance Economy. This course explores many successful and failed examples of the roles of industrial, financial, and political actors in different sectors.

Few of the examples shared throughout this course show how synergies between policymakers, public procurement authorities and businesses allow “maintaining and profitably exploiting manufactured assets over long periods of time to achieve inclusive prosperity”. Others show that innovative SMEs can be highly competitive and profitable.

The Performance Economy is about:

• People: selling performance, such as objects as a service, is a skill and labour-intensive service activity, which has to be performed locally (e.g. airlines selling safe transport from A to B).

  
  

• Planet: maintaining the function or performance of assets over extended periods considerably reduces resource consumption, prevents GHG emissions (reduction of national CO2 emissions by 66%) and minimizes waste.

• Economics: Producing performance, selling performance, and maintaining the function or performance of assets over extended periods is profitable and provides corporate resilience against black swan events and resource security at low cost. 

• Innovation: The business models of the Performance Economy enable the exploitation of sufficiency and systems solutions, besides the traditional efficiency ones, and will profit from future advances in circular sciences. Multi-skill education, training, and novel long-life components will further increase the Performance Economy’s feasibility and profitability. 

• Competitiveness: Maintaining ownership of the materials embodied in physical assets over the longest time possible requires a combination of technical and commercial innovation. This saves supply chain compliance and transaction costs and will profit from governmental carbon credits and water preservation bonuses.

Global Equity and Climate Justice. The Circular Industrial Economy plays a major role in today’s strategy to achieve global zero carbon emissions. Only reducing carbon emissions ‘below zero’ in the North will enable developing nations to build the infrastructure of health, education and mobility necessary to sustainably increase the quality of life of their population.