Circular economy. The Greek industry leaders’ way towards a transformational shift

•Greek industrial leaders have set the groundwork for a transition to the CE.•They feel rather vulnerable in shifting to CE models and practices.•The most common CE processes adapted are recycling and waste management.•They take advantage of funding mechanisms of national strategy on CE issues.•Culture and markets confrontation difficult change in well-established companies. Circular Economy (CE) has caught the eye of scholars, practitioners and policy makers. Τhe discussion so far seems to touch mainly the meso and macro level, while investigations on implementation issues regard mainly start-ups or new, flexible SMEs with CE-based visions. Up to date, there is extremely limited research on the challenges that well-established – usually deeply rooted in the linear model - organizations face when deciding a shift to the CE. However, this is undeniably a major challenge and it appears that there are many questions to be answered for such established organizations which indent to apply the concept in their business models successfully. The research purports to shed some light in this direction. For that purpose, a sample of the 200 TOP business in Greece that had implemented CE procedures was surveyed in order to: a) investigate the ways that Greek leading companies try to implement CE principles in view of procedures, practices and measures; and b) identify the level of adjustment to specific national directives and EU policies. The study uncovers the difficulty of such leading business to embrace the innovativeness of the circular economy and their positioning to encounter the emergent CE issue pointing to the need of different approaches for them by policymakers. This is actually the study's main contribution: it highlights the vulnerability of large national leading companies in such radical transitions, their selective strategic choices, their insecurity and confusion and the adjustments needed to decide a transition to CE.