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Increasing awareness of anthropogenic im-

pacts on the planet has lead to efforts to re-

duce negative environmental impacts in product

development for several decades. Benets to

companies who focus on sustainability initiatives

have been put forth more recently, leading to

many efforts to incorporate sustainability consi-

derations in their product innovation processes.

The majority of current sustainability consi-

derations in industry constrain design space by

emphasizing reduced material and energy ows

across the products life cycle. However, there

is also an opportunity to use awareness of sus-

tainability to bring attention to new facets of

design space and to drive innovation. Specically

there is an opportunity for product-service sys-

tems (PSS) to be a vehicle through which sustai-

nability-driven innovation occurs.

A framework for strategic sustainable deve-

lopment (FSSD) provides the basis for under-

standing sustainability in this work, and provides

clarity with regard to how to think about sus-tainable products and service innovations. The

backcasting approach included in this frame-

work also provides insight into how incremental

and radical approaches could be aligned within

the product innovation working environment.

This thesis explores how sustainability con-

siderations can be better integrated into exis-

ting product innovation working environments

in order to drive innovation processes within

rms, with a specic emphasis on opportunities

that occur as sustainability knowledge leads to

innovation through a product-service system

approach. It endeavors to contribute to both

theory development within the emerging sus-

tainable PSS design research area, and also to

advance the state of practice within industry by

connecting dots between the state of theory

and the state of practice.

Societys opportunity to become more sus-

tainable and industrys desire for innovation in

order to lead to or increase protability are

often in conict. However, this thesis argues

that knowledge of global social and ecological

sustainability can be used to drive innovation

processes, and that there are win-win oppor-

tunities that can often be achieved through a

PSS approach. There is some, but not sufcient,

support for the inclusion of sustainability con-

siderations in the product innovation process,

and even fewer tools to support the use ofsustainability to drive innovation. In response,

an approach to providing support that brings

together the FSSD and various approaches to

systems modeling and simulation is presented.

Opportunities to use sustainability-friendly att-

ributes of existing products through a PSS-ap-

proach are also presented.

ABSTRACT

ISSN 1650-2140

ISBN: 978-91-7295-188-42010:08