Addressing sustainability: comprehensive frameworks for evaluating new product development

Abstract

The development and commercialization of novel sophisticated products, exerts a significant burden on the environment, throughout its life-cycle. Moreover, the environmental impact also generates a significant impact onto the socio-economic dimensions. Therefore, it is imperative to include criteria for addressing socio-economic and environmental sustainability. Previously developed approaches for sustainability evaluation, were comprehensive, resource intensive and lacked simplicity. The proposed framework for Sustainable New Product Development, utilizes a Systems Engineering Approach based on multi-criteria analysis. The investigation also proposes 2 capital budgeting based methods for evaluation, namely NPV@ Sustainability and Profitability Index @ Sustainability using Life Cycle Assessment. These evaluation methods express the financial cash flows in accordance with the impact associated with the sustainability criteria and the core project milestones of the product development endeavor. The evaluation methods, together with the product development framework, are applicable during key decision points of Stage 2 and 3, in the Stage-Gate Process of New Product Development.