read the assignment description, the Case company description, as well as the Circular Business Model Planning

Before you start this assignment, please make sure you have read the assignment description, the Case company description, as well as the Circular Business Model Planning Tool. 

In this first part of the assignment, you will be using an example built from work by the real-life case company Caterpillar, and analyze how a company’s business model may be shaped to enable greater circularity. For this, you will learn to apply the Circular Business Model Planning Tool introduced in Week 2. In the assignment you will focus on a few of the business model elements and start working with a version of the tool that is partially pre-filled. If you would like to see a full case mapped, you can go back to Lecture 3: "Business model Innovation" in which the tool is applied on the case of Fairphone. 

As a first task, you will explore Caterpillar’s business model and fill in parts of the Circular Business Model Planning Tool. After studying the case description,  you "fill in" the three blank spots in columns C and D of the tool (see the template attached). N.B. By "filling in" the cells we do not mean editing or writing in the template, but providing a description for each of the three blank cells, in a text box below.

As second task, you get to pick two examples of business model elements filled in the tool that you think help the company realize circularity. For each of them, briefly explain how you think they help realizing circularity.  

By using this planning tool, you can gain an insight into how business value is created along a product's life cycle, plan and analyze how circularity may be integrated into a business model, and recognize interdependencies of business model elements across various life cycle steps.