Conference Agenda

Implementing sustainable product development requires assessing sustainability performance throughout the product development process. However, companies face a wide range of assessment approaches and lack guidance on how to select and combine them effectively. Research increasingly calls for coherent methodological support, or a methods ecosystem, to enable consistent adoption. This paper addresses this need by combining empirical insights on capability needs related to product sustainability performance assessment with a synthesis of literature on product development phases, decisions, and tasks. A conceptual model is proposed to show how assessment tasks and capability needs change across development stages and to clarify when effectiveness- and efficiency-oriented approaches are required. The conceptual model is intended to advance research on the creation of coherent methodological support for product sustainability performance assessment by identifying characteristics of supports needed in different stages.

Decision makers in product engineering face a high degree of uncertainty regarding targeted action on diverse and dynamic sustainability demands. This paper reports on the application and evaluation of a Guide developed to support decision makers in addressing this uncertainty and initiating targeted sustainability action. The Guide was applied by facilitators in collaboration with product engineering decision makers at a nano-precision positioning technology company to understand, operationalize, and implement targeted sustainability action. The study revealed that applying the Guide indeed led to context-specific sustainability action at the company and reduced uncertainties for decision makers. It also revealed that decision makers desire pre-fixed sustainability conceptions as a means to perceived uncertainty reduction, although working with pre-fixed conceptions reduces context-specificity of sustainability action and, hence, can lead to inconsistencies in implementation resulting in, e.g., economic risks. The results, therefore, highlight that addressing decision makers uncertainty without pre-fixed conceptions of sustainability is important.

This study applies the Design Research Methodology to explore the concept of sufficiency and identify key characteristics of businesses operationalising sufficiency. The literature review revealed the absence of a universal definition of sufficiency and a noticeable gap between the theoretical understanding and practical application. To address this, the study presents a set of sufficiency-driven business strategies and develops the Sufficiency-Driven Business Model Canvas - a framework that clarifies core elements as well as supports companies in developing sufficiency-driven business models.

Circular economy strategies are widely discussed, but their integration into hierarchical product development often lacks structural guidance. This paper proposes a decomposition-point-based framework that allocates strategies within RFLT-based system refinement. A DP allocation review links strategies to requirements, functions, responsibilities and strategy-specific follow-up indicators, considering obsolescence and trade-offs. A BOM-based coffee machine example illustrates the approach.