Sustainable Product Innovation: The Importance of the Front-End Stage in the Innovation Process

With an overpopulated planet, hungry for electricity and resources, sustainability will be one of the biggest challenges in the future. Present production and consumption patterns are causing serious environmental and human problems and cannot be sustained in a world with rising human aspirations. The challenges and opportunities for sustainable...

Sustainability in the front-end of innovation at design agencies

In the two last decades a considerable amount of research has been conducted on the Front End of Innovation. This is the stage of the product development process where the design brief is formulated. This phase is argued to be crucial to the success of the final product. While the Front End of Innovation in general has been a hot research topic,...

Design for end of life: A design methodology for the early stages of an innovation process

The first phases of the engineering design process, such as the problem definition, the information gathering and the idea generation phase, are commonly considered as important steps in product development, since the cost of a product is assumed to be largely determined within these design steps. Besides limiting the product costs, designers...

Multidisciplinary teamwork as a crucial competence in modern engineering education programs

The current process of designing and developing new industrial products has become more differentiated and complex. This has resulted in the need for multidisciplinary teams from the initial product development stage. Because engineers are mainly educated in designing typical technical product related aspects, the need for multidisciplinary...

Sustainability in Design Engineering Education; Experiences in Northern Europe

In recent years, the implementation of sustainability into the curricula of engineering has become increasingly important. This paper focuses on the experiences of integrating sustainability in Design Engineering education in the academic bachelor programs at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, at the University College of West...