Knowledge Dissemination of Sustainable Product Development

• Published in: European conference on knowledge management 2023-09, Vol.24 (2), p.1106-1115
• Main Author: Relich, Marcin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2048-8963; 2048-8971
• DOI: 10.34190/eckm.24.2.1519

Current environmental regulations and customer expectations force manufacturing companies to develop new products considering ecological, social, and economic issues. At present, product sustainability, time-to-market, and profit are equally important factors in the new product development process. Consequently, product design should embrace issues related to sustainability in the entire product life cycle. These issues refer to manufacturing processes, product use, and the post-use phase, including product reuse, remanufacturing, recycling or disposal. Product design considering these issues is called sustainable design or eco-design. The product development process aims to create a new product that can be a modification of existing products or be completely new for a company and market. Innovations are widely used as a key component for addressing sustainable development concerns. The role of product design and innovation in the quest for sustainability has received considerable attention among researchers and businesses in recent years. This research is a novel bibliometric analysis of sustainable product development, product design, and product innovation in the last 30 years, from 1993 to 2022. The results of data analysis embrace trends regarding the yearly number of publications devoted to sustainable product development, sustainable product design, and sustainable product innovation. Moreover, the collected publications were classified into subject areas, source titles, and source type. The bibliometric analysis reveals the most popular journals to knowledge dissemination of sustainable product development, sustainable design, and sustainable innovation. The results show that the increase of publications devoted to sustainable product design and sustainable product innovation is particularly strong in the last 5 years. Moreover, the number of publications related to sustainable product design is over ten times larger than related to sustainable product innovation.