Sustainable Product Innovation and Consumer Communication

Abstract

Sustainable product innovation and its communication with consumers are essential for the realisation of sustainability through sustainable consumption. This research conducted a structured review addressing sustainable product innovation, including sustainable product development and service, environmental and socio-economic impacts, communication of the sustainable product innovation to consumers via ecolabelling and declarations, and sustainability benchmarking. The review revealed that current research in sustainable product development and service focuses more on environmental and economic aspects, but the social aspect has not been given enough attention, and the interconnection between product development and service needs to be further addressed. Systematic sustainable innovation, considering the whole life cycle of the product to control and improve overall sustainability in the early product development stages should be paid more attention. To overcome the gaps, a framework for sustainable product development and services (SPDS) was developed and presented. Furthermore, this review found that communicating understandable environmental and socio-economic performance of products and services with consumers is still challenging. Barriers are identified in deriving benchmarks through sustainability performance assessments. This paper also provides examples of overcoming the barriers in sustainable benchmarking and communication with the “eco-cost” method, which engages both B2B and B2C customers to promote sustainable consumption.