Ruud Balkenende is professor of Circular Product Design at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft. He received his PhD on a doctoral thesis about the use of copper as an automotive exhaust catalyst material. In 1990 he joined Philips Research, where he has been active at the interface of technological innovation and business applications.

Since 2009 he has been mainly involved in research and development related to materials scarcity and product recyclability. Linking product architecture and materials science to resource efficiency was the main driver. Since 2013 his activities extended from recyclability to circular economy, i.e. reusing products or parts at a functional level instead of recovering materials.