Product Life Cycle Management (Volume I).

The driving force behind this research is the need to move beyond traditional environmental management, towards product life cycle management. In the last five to ten years, the focus of environmental initiatives for the electronics industry has shifted from company or site based management systems to product based management systems that strive for improved environmental performance over the whole product life cycle. This shift in attention has increased focus on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and in particular its application to product design (Design for Environment (DfE)). However, a number of factors have weakened the application and decision-making basis of LCA within industry. Although accepted as a concept, LCA is often viewed by industry as a tool suited to the domain of academia; the consequence of this is that typically the results are too complex and controversial to be useful to the ‘lay’ person and are ignored. In particular, to enable LCA to influence product Research and Development (R&D) activities in fast-moving and rapidly changing business environments, its practicality must be enhanced. To elicit more appropriate use of LCA, a fundamental understanding of the decision-making stages of innovation and product development within R&D is needed. In particular, the development of product takeback legislation in Europe will have a profound effect on the electronics industry. Companies will need to fundamentally re-appraise their product design from a life cycle perspective, including materials selection, assembly and disassembly processes and the total supply chain including end-of-life recovery. This research starts by examining these challenges, and critically reviewing Life Cycle Assessment techniques. Whilst understanding and appreciating the complexity of environmental issues, coupled with the fast moving and complex consumer electronics business environment, it is clear that life cycle approaches must be simplified greatly if they are to be integrated successfully into business processes. A simplified life cycle approach is developed to identify and quantify environmental impacts for a mobile phone. In particular takeback and recycling have been analysed systematically from a life cycle perspective. Furthermore, the decision-making life cycle has been investigated alongside the product life cycle, to provide a new perspective towards integrating environmental criteria into business practice and improving strategies for the environmental performance of products

Presenting the SCL model: adding value to business strategy through UCD principles

This paper presents the Sustainable Consumption Leveraging (SCL) Model and its toolkit, which was developed to help businesses examine their potential for enabling sustainable consumption whilst identifying areas of opportunity to improve their business model and value proposition. The paper begins by establishing the contribution of business towards sustainable consumption and sets out user-centred design (UCD) principles as a valuable approach to leverage sustainable consumption. The relationship between UCD principles and sustainable consumption in a business context was studied through qualitative research. The findings of in-depth interviews with experts, a focus group and a document analysis led to the construction of a theoretical framework, which was used to develop the SCL Model and its toolkit

Eco‐Holonic 4.0 Circular Business Model to Conceptualize Sustainable Value Chain Towards Digital Transition

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a circular business model based on an Eco-Holonic Architecture, through the integration of circular economy and holonic principles. A conceptual model is developed to manage the complexity of integrating circular economy principles, digital transformation, and tools and frameworks for sustainability into business models. The proposed architecture is multilevel and multiscale in order to achieve the instantiation of the sustainable value chain in any territory. The architecture promotes the incorporation of circular economy and holonic principles into new circular business models. This integrated perspective of business model can support the design and upgrade of the manufacturing companies in their respective industrial sectors. The conceptual model proposed is based on activity theory that considers the interactions between technical and social systems and allows the mitigation of the metabolic rift that exists between natural and social metabolism. This study contributes to the existing literature on circular economy, circular business models and activity theory by considering holonic paradigm concerns, which have not been explored yet. This research also offers a unique holonic architecture of circular business model by considering different levels, relationships, dynamism and contextualization (territory) aspects

Towards designing a sustainable is-enabled service delivery system

This paper aims to bring into focus the concept of service sustainability. The normative literature advocates that services by companies, government institutions and service delivery are still posing great challenges to many organizations in this digital age. In highlighting the distinctive feature of service innovation, businesses will be able to maintain competitive advantage. In examining the literature on the service concept, successful companies have the customer at the forefront of their business strategy. As a result, the authors formulate suggestions on the most effective way an organization and the people concerned, can recast strategic thinking. to anticipate and adapt to ever increasing changing service environment. The contribution of the study is an IS-enabled Service Delivery Model (SDM) that places customer and staff as an integral part of the service delivery system with managed interactions and continuous quality control. This intends to support practitioners and researchers which could provide the former useful means of conceptualizing service, and raises an important issue to the latter in revisiting service quality research

Greening the design brief

Front End Innovation is a hot research topic, but there is still little research done on its relationship to design for sustainability. This paper explores the challenges of integrating environmental sustainability in this early stages of an innovation process and the design brief. The study is based on a content analysis of 35 design briefs from Belgian SMEs and multinationals, and a practitioners session with representatives from 14 Belgian companies. This results indicate a limited uptake of sustainability in Belgian design briefs. Furthermore, it argues that the use of certain strategies, such as front-loading, pushing sustainability upstream in the briefing process and sustainability opportunity identification in the front end, could help in greening the design brief

Stakeholder engagement as a facilitator of organizational learning

This paper examines the relationship between stakeholder engagement and competence building. Following the dual perspective of the firm, which indicated that managers deal with both transactions and competences concurrently, we argue that stakeholder interactions also concern both transaction cost reduction and value creation. Based on a review of the extant literature, we incorporated a micro-macro connection between organizational learning and competence building. Further to this, we developed a conceptual framework by linking stakeholder engagement and organizational learning. This framework demonstrates that stakeholder relations may have significant effects on organizational learning and thus stakeholder engagement can play the role of facilitator in building firm competences

Networking Innovation in the European Car Industry : Does the Open Innovation Model Fit?

The automobile industry is has entered an innovation race. Uncertain technological trends, long development cycles, highly capital intensive product development, saturated markets, and environmental and safety regulations have subjected the sector to major transformations. The technological and organizational innovations related to these transformations necessitate research that can enhance our understanding of the characteristics of the new systems and extrapolate the implications for companies as well as for the wider economy. Is the industry ready to change and accelerate the pace of its innovation and adaptability? Have the traditional supply chains transformed into supply networks and regional automobile ecosystems? The study investigates the applicability of the Open Innovation concept to a mature capital-intensive asset-based industry, which is preparing for a radical technological discontinuity - the European automobile industry - through interviewing purposely selected knowledgeable respondents across seven European countries. The findings contribute to the understanding of the OI concept by identifying key obstacles to the wider adoption of the OI model, and signalling the importance of intermediaries and large incumbents for driving network development and OI practices as well as the need of new competencies to be developed by all players.Peer reviewe

User characteristics for customer involvement in innovation processes : deconstructing the Lead User-concept

Despite the growing evidence of the beneficial nature of customer and user involvement in new product or service development, research into user types and customer characteristics for innovation is still scarce. One notable exception can be found in the literature dealing with the so-called Lead User. Although there is a substantial research corpus dealing with Lead User innovation, the integration of Lead Users or Lead User-methods is definitely not common within most firms. We believe that disentangling the Lead Userconcept into more concrete user types and customer characteristics would benefit and optimize user involvement in innovation processes. Within this paper, we describe six user types based on five dimensions, associated with the Lead User-concept and abstracted from various literature streams. We further propose some guidelines for an optimal integration of these users within innovation methodologies and sketch out some lines for future research