Adding Sustainability to Lean Product Development

Abstract

Where there are calls for sustainable products, the inclusion of sustainability in formal approaches for new product development is still in its infancy. Firms face challenges in (i) managing development of new sustainable products that offer value to customers, (ii) reducing time-to-market and (iii) efficient use of resources. Contrastingly, the rationalisation found in lean product development that addresses these concerns, but not yet sustainability, has attracted the attention of many since its inception in the 1990s. The increasing adoption of lean product development by firms offers the opportunity to also include sustainability in its processes, methods and tools; this will allow new products to be economically profitable, ecologically correct, operationally safe, socially fair and culturally accepted. To this purpose, this paper performs a systematic literature review to find existing methods and tools of lean product development that contribute to sustainability. The findings lead to inference that there is not a lack of methods and tools, but their use. Furthermore, from an integral perspective of sustainability, just a few tools cover the social dimension or the three dimensions all together. Consequently, a holistic systems approach that bring integration and synergy to the use of methods and tools on sustainable product development to the table is needed.