An investigation into the extent to which sustainable product development practices are implemented in manufacturing companies

Abstract

In recent decades, the pressure from regulations and consumers for products with enhanced sustainability performance has escalated the implementation of sustainability actions by companies. For manufacturing companies specifically, Sustainable Product Development (SPD) is a key approach for reducing the sustainability impacts of the developed products, across their entire life cycle. Despite the availability of wide range of management practices for SPD to support embedding sustainability into the product development process, the extent of their application by companies remains underexplored. To fulfil this gap, an industry survey was conducted to investigate the capability of manufacturing companies to apply a consolidated set of 61 SPD management practices. The overall results which comprised 20 companies across 14 sectors revealed that most of the practices are still applied at a low capability level by most companies. This result indicates a large theory-practice gap particularly in understanding the influence of the type of business, variation in capability levels across different business processes and stages of the product development that influence the successful implementation of sustainability actions in companies. Hence, stronger collaboration between the academia and industry sectors are essential to transform new knowledge into actionable strategies.