Exploring Circular Economy and Innovation Literature: A Topic Modelling Approach

This study presents a data-driven review of the literature on innovation and circular economy (CE) using a topic modeling approach. By further developing an exploratory literature review method and implementing it in the visual coding platform KNIME, the authors analyze a corpus of 778 journal articles. The methodology offers an accessible approach for researchers to conduct state-of-the-art text mining without requiring prior programming knowledge, making it easily replicable for exploratory literature analyses across various research fields. The topic modeling analysis using Latent Dirichlet Allocation reveals eleven distinct research topics within the CE and innovation literature, encompassing themes such as eco-innovation, organizational capabilities, waste valorization, collaboration, policy and system transition, business models, regional and urban development, food and agriculture, design strategies and technologies, waste management and material recycling, fashion and textile industry, and policies, technologies, and indicators. The findings highlight the interdisciplinary nature of CE and innovation research, with strong links to sustainability and a focus on processes, strategies, and sector-specific applications. An examination of research interest and impact over time reveals a growing scholarly engagement with CE and innovation topics, particularly from 2016 onwards. Additionally, individual topics trends over time are presented. The synthesis of these findings highlights the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of the CE and innovation research landscape and outlines several opportunities for future research in underexplored areas.