۱- Introduction

۲- The Strategic Planning Method for the Sustainability Integration in the Product Development Process (PEPDIPS)

۳- Application of the PEPDIPS method

۴- Discussion

۵- Conclusions

References

Abstract

Sustainability issues have been force companies to change how they think about their business models if they want to keep a competitive advantage. However, despite the diversity of tools for sustainable production, the integration of its concept has not yet reached a significant number of companies around the world. The reason for this is the need of more knowledge about sustainability integration’ importance to the company in the long term, the difficulty to identify the initial point to changes or the difficulty to structure this advance in the improvement process. Based on this scenario, this paper presents the Strategic Planning method for the Sustainability Integration in the Product Development Process which aims to guide, facilitate and accelerate the sustainability integration into the product development process by make changes in the business management with the support of the strategic planning and the continuous improvement process. It is a maturity method that can be applied by any type of company because of their use of a common set of evaluation parameters. The benefits from this research are the improvement, deepening, and systematization of the sustainability issues in the product development process through a maturity view of the strategic planning concept, and, the development of a new guide to assessing the companies’ strengths and weakness to drive the implementation of a shared vision between multiples teams. Also, the application of the conceptual method is presented.

Introduction

Sustainability issues have been causing direct interference in the business’s characteristics of the 21st century since it strengthens the companies’ competitive advantage (Nidumolu et al., 2009). And more, sustainability can drivers innovation strategies (Klewitz and Hansen, 2014) and it will ongoing be common because reducing pollution is often coincident with improvements in the productivity (Porter and Van der Linde, 1995). On this point, Shrivastava (1995) describes that in order to achieve sustainable development companies need to have the organizational capacity to create inimitable green production systems, through the development of new structured strategies for environmental improvements, whose costs must be efficient to ensure the long-term profit. Based on this, Bocken et al. (2014) argue that sustainable business models are innovations that change the way the organization creates, deliver and capture value. Even so, sustainable production remains a challenge for professionals and academics because many companies still need systematic orientations on how to manage sustainability integration into business processes (Karlsson and Luttropp, 2006). And, also on how sustainable strategies are formed (Behnam and Rasche, 2009). In addition, the literature of sustainable business model little discusses how to link sustainability practices and overall organizational performances (Maletic et al., 2014). So, there is a common sense about the necessity to have more general framework with the possibilities of being applied in most organizations to help it make sustainability integration (Baumgartner and Ebner, 2010). Also, these new general frameworks should assess the current state and the longer-term of sustainability integration in company decision systems (Hallstedt et al., 2010). Thus, strategies approaches need to be used to support sustainable new product development (Gmelin and Seuring, 2014).