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There is an urgent call for transitioning towards a circular economy (CE) in housing. Pivotal to this transition is implementing business models aligned with CE principles, such as the ones informed by the product-service system (PSS). However, incorporating the PSS into housing to realize a CE faces significant challenges within an industry characterized by systemic rigidity and institutional inertia. This study investigates the barriers faced in deploying the PSS and its CE potential in housing.

The authors conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders experienced in the deployment of PSS and CE in housing projects. Analysis used deductive coding, guided by institutional theory’s regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive pillars, followed by inductive coding development.

Twelve key barriers emerged across three pillars, underlying the significance of not only regulative but also normative and cultural-cognitive barriers. The findings indicate that the current institutional environment impedes the establishment of legitimacy for the deployment of PSS and its CE potential in housing.

Following the findings, a diversified institutional support system enabled by the collaborative effort of the government, managing and financing actors and industry associations is required to overcome deployment barriers.

This study advances knowledge at the intersection of housing and circular business model innovation. It connects theory to practice by applying institutional theory to real-world barriers in deploying the PSS for a CE in housing and lays the groundwork for practical changes.

Despite the undeniable need for innovation in hospital building design, the literature highlights the disconnect between research and practice as the primary knowledge gap hindering such innovation. This study shows this focus to be an oversimplification, for the complex processes that trigger design innovations and impact their ecosystems need to be examined from a systemic perspective. This paper aims to conceptualise the evolution of hospital building design and identify and explain the main factors triggering design and construction innovations over the past 100 years.

A novel hybrid research design to mixed grounded theory (MGT) methodology, with Charmaz constructivist paradigm, is developed as a new systematic way of constructing and interpreting the concepts and interconnections among them that triggered design innovation.

This study represents a taxonomy of concepts and an explanatory innovation framework, containing 617 interconnections between 146 factors classified across 14 categories. The complex innovation ecosystem comprises multi-faceted processes between heterogenous factors with both individual and collective impacts on design innovations.

This research highlights the main components of the innovation ecosystem and its overall behaviour in this field, and the most influential and interrelated contextual factors, as well as representing and mapping generative interactions that support innovation processes. This knowledge can help hospital researchers, designers, policymakers and stakeholders adopt a multidimensional outlook to analyse the strength of all influential factors, introduce potential novel ways of collaborating, conceptualise an organisational approach, re-formulate research questions through transdisciplinary methods and introduce interdisciplinary courses and programs in architecture schools, thereby contributing to timely design innovation.