Content of reverse flows and the way of dealing with them in companies can serve as one of the sources for inventions and innovations in new product design. This issue can have manifold reasons - from lean thinking or just simply cost and profit focused approach (e.g. how can we use and prevent waste from the reverse flows?), through Extended Producer Responsibility (legal requirements for product design), Corporate Social Responsibility approach (sustainability for stakeholders based on product design that would not harm anybody and promote sustainability of partners in the case of reverse product flows) to Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing and Product Recovery or green or eco product design. This paper introduces results of preliminary empirical survey focused on the investigation of relationships between different dimensions and measures of new product designing and several reverse flows management issues. The aim of the analysis is to discover some patterns of companies’ behavior when the possibility to utilize the content of reverse flows for the new product development exists.Content of reverse flows and the way of dealing with them in companies can serve as one of the sources for inventions and innovations in new product design. This issue can have manifold reasons - from lean thinking or just simply cost and profit focused approach (e.g. how can we use and prevent waste from the reverse flows?), through Extended Producer Responsibility (legal requirements for product design), Corporate Social Responsibility approach (sustainability for stakeholders based on product design that would not harm anybody and promote sustainability of partners in the case of reverse product flows) to Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing and Product Recovery or green or eco product design. This paper introduces results of preliminary empirical survey focused on the investigation of relationships between different dimensions and measures of new product designing and several reverse flows management issues. The aim of the analysis is to discover some patterns of companies’ behavior when the possibility to utilize the content of reverse flows for the new product development exists
