Publication year: 2010
Source: Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 15 July 2010

Effrosyni, Petala , Renee, Wever , Chris, Dutilh , Han, Brezet

Organizations face challenges with regards to the incorporation of sustainability in the early stages of their new product development processes (NPD). This paper explores these challenges in order to understand the barriers for incorporating well-defined sustainability targets in NPD briefs. The study is based on a content analysis of 202 new product development briefs within the FMCG industry, in particular Unilever. The paper concludes that the incorporation of sustainability in the new product development briefs does not guarantee results. Furthermore, there are several organizational issues which could function either as success or failure factors for the entire process.

Publication year: 2010
Source: Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 14 July 2010

Amlan, Mukherjee , Helen, Muga

The diversity of priorities and differing awareness of sustainable practices among stakeholders in the architecture, engineering and construction industry is critically shaping the adoption of green technology, and the rate at which the industry is shifting towards more sustainable practices. In this paper, we develop an integrated framework that allows reorganization and integration of existing sustainability research in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, emphasizing the perspective of decision-makers and stakeholders. Further, an agent-based model is introduced that allows study of the decision-maker with the decision context, thus making them an integral part of the decision-making process rather than...

Publication year: 2010
Source: Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 13 July 2010

Afie M., Badawy

Publication year: 2010
Source: Futures, In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available online 28 April 2010

Itsuki C., Handoh , Toshitaka, Hidaka

Sustainability has a plethora of ambiguous definitions, partly because there are no consistent timescales acceptable to all interested authors. Co-evolutionary processes between the anthroposphere and the biosphere offer an alternative to sustainability and hence the timescales could be examined by a simple systems analysis. We consider a system of anthropospheric food energy demand and entropy production to evaluate the timescales of sustainability at past technological revolutions in the anthroposphere. Our analysis suggests that each of technological revolutionary steps, the Neolithic/Agricultural, Industrial, and Information Revolutions, has forced the sustainability timescale to decrease by an order of 2. However, we suggest that...