Opportunities for Further Research

The Grounded Theory study was intended to provide an overall picture of how sustainability is being considered during the development of consumer goods. The findings were distilled into 18 propositions summed up in Table 9. All warrant more focused and in-depth follow-up investigations. Thus, several suggestions for further work are made.

Table 9: Propositions Resulting from the Qualitative Research Phase Proposition # Content

Proposition 1 Product developers’ understanding of product sustainability appears largely unaffected by the academic discourse and instead refers to the type of products they are in charge of.

Proposition 2 Product developers share the vague belief that product sustainability is to gain importance by means of changing consumer behavior and tightened regulations.

Proposition 3 Product developers believe to have little exercisable leverage to enhance product sustainability in their routine development tasks.

Proposition 4 Companies starting to get involved with product sustainability often exclusively focus on separate product lines.

Proposition 5 Sustainability of non-durable consumer goods is often signaled through a stereotyped exterior design.

Proposition 6 Sustainability of durable consumer goods is only seldom signaled through a stereotyped exterior design as this could signal lower functional performance.

Proposition 7 Improving the sustainability performance of extant product concepts often yield in rather incremental changes.

Proposition 8 Developing product service systems to improve sustainability receives little attention in practice despite the high attention in the literature.

Proposition 9 For improving product sustainability, developers focus on the manufacturing phase.

Influencing consumer behavior or end-of-life aspects receive less attention.

Proposition 10 Product sustainability is often not codified strictly within the development process.

Proposition 11 The lack of codified sustainability criteria can result in sustainability not being considered in a systematic way during product development.

Proposition 12 Improving the sustainability of existing products often yields trade-offs between sustainability and product performance.

Proposition 13 Product developers are hesitant to use bio-based polymers because of technical hurdles and the volatile public discourse.

Proposition 14 Product developers experience difficulties to evaluate their development decisions from a life-cycle perspective.

Proposition 15 If sustainability is not part of the companies’ strategy, product developers experience difficulties in selling their efforts internally and externally.

Proposition 16 Product sustainability is of little importance for most consumers’ purchasing decisions.

Proposition 17 Product developers do not know how to catalyze sustainability-based purchasing decisions through product development activities.

Proposition 18 Product developers experience difficulties distinguishing their efforts from competitors’

greenwashing activities in a credible way.

Propositions 1, 2, and 3 are suited as a starting point for a large scale quantitative study across different industries and also across different countries. The field of sustainable product development could truly benefit from a conclusive picture of what developers make out of sustainability as well as which crucial drivers and roadblocks exist in different industries. Such a comparative study could also facilitate transferring best practices among remote industry sectors and contribute to an improved understanding of the sustainability challenge.

Propositions 4, 5, and 6 pertain to characteristic approaches consumer goods companies employ on their journey towards more sustainable products. However, developers admit

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that they often do not know how consumers perceive these approaches. Therefore, the three propositions should be the focus of more in-depth research from the consumers’ point of view. It would be beneficial for companies to learn how consumers consciously or unconsciously evaluate their development efforts. Especially regarding Propositions 5 and 6, different products could be compared to each other to elaborate further on the work of Luchs et al. (2010, 2011, 2012, 2015). They investigate how consumers behave when faced with trade-offs between sustainability and other product aspects like functional performance and aesthetic appearance. However, sustainability is most of the time operationalized as a clearly measurable variable even though sustainability in practice cannot be communicated through an unambiguous number but through the result of all decisions product developers make. Thus, it appears valuable to extend such consumer studies into the sphere of issues product developers are in control of.

Propositions 7, 8, and 9 can be used as a starting point for investigating how more radical sustainability improvements could be incorporated into consumer goods. Specifically, case studies from other industries could provide insights on how truly questioning extant product concepts or exploring the possibilities of product service systems could foster sustainable development.

Propositions 10, 11, and 12 call for further research on clearly codifying sustainability issues in product development processes. Since the current study revealed that some companies are advanced in this respect, it seems valuable to conduct thorough case analyses to expose successful approaches that could be transferred to other companies. From a conceptual point of view, these approaches could then be used for developing situation-specific methods helping companies to overcome the challenge of codifying their take on sustainability.

In case of Proposition 13, further research should focus on the behavioral aspects that keep developers from breaking new ground. For example, the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen 1985, 1991) could be employed to explore which major roadblocks exist and how product developers’ ambivalence towards renewable raw materials can be overcome.

Proposition 14 calls for further conceptual research to support the decision-making in sustainable product development. Since the participants indicated to encounter problems in assessing even the cursory impact of some development decisions, tools providing an overview of major interdependencies between sustainability metrics and different types of development decisions would be a meaningful support. Such tools could also help to effectively communicate sustainability improvements to internal and external stakeholders (Proposition 15).

Finally, Propositions 16, 17, and 18 warrant further quantitative research to investigate how consumers’ purchasing decisions can be influenced through product development measures without running the risk of being accused of greenwashing.

Apart from elaborating on the current study’s propositions, further research could focus on the typology of company approaches towards sustainability. It appears promising to investigate the different trajectories companies follow while evolving their approaches, e.g.

through growing from a Minimalist to a Test Balloonist. Also, as the consumer goods industry features some specific characteristics, it would be interesting to explore the applicability of the typology for other industries.

The findings and implications of the qualitative study presented in this chapter shed light on the research questions of this dissertation as they deal with the approaches consumer goods companies employ to develop more sustainable products (research question 1) and with the challenges that have to be met when striving for higher product sustainability (research question 2). Also, the managerial implications put forward in Section 5.10.2 yield some recommendations for the practice of developing more sustainable products (research question 3). To derive further practical recommendations that trigger specific problems participants reported to encounter, a subsequent quantitative study was conducted. It is laid out in the following chapter.