Sustainable new product development: a longitudinal review

Abstract

Traditional new product development aims to integrate people, tools, and technology to shorten time-to-market and boost economic gains. Under the triple bottom line of sustainability, the integration with the environment brings an additional layer of complexity. Sustainable new product development (SNPD) is a new and ever-growing research area. This paper offers a novel combination of systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of themes in SNPD in the past 25 years. The search for the relevant literature in Scopus citation database returned 1541 peer-reviewed papers. The analysis of co-occurrence of keywords identified the main themes of product life cycle, product design, sustainable products, production and environmental standards, innovation, human component of sustainability, supply chains, polymer, and renewable resource. Concerns with economic and environmental sustainability were present since the early research on SNPD. However, there is a growing concern with a holistic approach to SNDP integrating people, the economy, and the planet. The evolution of themes showed a need to integrate further the social aspects of sustainability into SNDP. A research agenda closes the paper proposing themes that deserve further scrutiny, related to sustainable products, product life cycle, and product design.