Your process, but per project?
OSCE days is an event, and the early LOTE experiences show events can be organized on a shoestring budget if needed. Maybe do the first one like that, then gauge interest for follow-up versions, and if there is, then care about sustainability / proper funding for these?
But your process, Nadia, is great for finding a sustainability model for each of the circular economy projects that will be involved. If using this process in the runup to the OSCE days, it would make it a kind of OSCE business incubator, being attractive to participants partially for this prospect of getting help to set up a “sustainable sustainability business”.
The advantage of the circular economy topic, compared to most other open source stuff, is that it deals with physical goods and upcycling. So often enough, straightforward business models are possible. Some project ideas with business models, off the top of my head:
- Open hardware paper pelletizer. If somebody develops such a machine, the business model is to sell these machines. Home owners, truck dwellers and everything else with a wood stove would surely buy them, as it allows free space heating: just ask your neighbors if you can have their paper trash …
- Electronics Remanufacturing. This has been all the hype in 2012 (see this list in my blog). Since then it has cooled down and margins have become lower, but my recent tests with a strategy of focusing on some models only were quite encouraging. This of course needs a collaborative buy-in platform with multiple buyers, each specializing in some products. Incidentally, we have exactly that one-of-a-kind software around. We developed it as a cooperative strategy to cope with falling margins when Aamazon and eBay entered the remanufacturing markets in 2012, but then ran out of resources to market and establish that platform. If a group around the OSCE days would become interested in operating it, we could negotiate something :) It's a business model that can work, esp. in emerging markets like India, but needs sweat equity by a medium-sized group to get it all started properly.
- Freedom Fones. This has been another business idea that I worked on for some time. It's about adding some upcycling to the smartphone remanufacturing, making the results more valuable. Namely, in the light of the post-Snowden area, it's about (1) removing all of Google from an Android phone, (2) removing all spyware like Google's wifi location gathering, (3) rooting the phone, installing CyanogenMod and adding recommendable open source Android apps. Often enough, this can bring newest Android 4 to phones whose latest official version is Android 2.3 (which makes them "disposable trash" to many people). This is a circular economy project because it is about lifetime extension, and it's attractive to buyers because it is politically relevant.