Sustainability dimensions in product development in Swedish manufacturing companies

• This study explores how Swedish manufacturing companies integrate sustainability into their product development process. We study the driving forces behind the decision to develop sustainability strategies and the factors that influence the integration of sustainability into product development. The primary conclusion is that the concept of sustainability has entered the Swedish business culture and become a normative part of the decision ecology to an extent greater than what is mandated by legal requirements. All the actors that we investigate in this study (owners, top managers, employees, suppliers, customers) appear to be pushing for enhanced sustainability. Nonetheless, the main, and most powerful, impetus is very clearly from top management or owners rather than the other actors. This is consistent with an evolving notion that sustainability in the environmental sense is now felt to be related to financial sustainability. Thus, the elite sectors of business (top managers and owners) appear to be imbuing their planning with additional aspects, such as sustainability, as the societal awareness of the connections between forms of sustainability develop. Additionally, we reveal differences based on organization size in terms of how they attempt to implement sustainable new product designs. Smaller companies tend to use more intuitive approaches while larger companies use more "standardized" and globally known "methods," in part because they may be more tightly connected with the global business knowledge ecosystems which tend to evolve and propagate "methods" or "tools."

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

sustainability dimensions

product development

manufacturing companies

Ekonomistyrning

Ekonomistyrning

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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