An Innovative Approach to Teaching Sustainable Design and Management

Abstract For many years the market leadership was driven by offering better price on more product functions and services. The world is currently shifting towards social responsibility thinking. This changes the market behaviour, and leads to more innovations, such as designing new product/service/system using re-usable parts, new electric motor concepts, or inventing new chemical production procedures generating less waste, and many more opportunities. This paper introduces a research valorisation activity that aims at developing a program of training and coaching to prepare students and industry partners to this emerging innovation wave. The most outstanding particularity of this program is that it combines management and engineering aspects of sustainability in a form that empowers trainees to deploy sustainable approaches in practice. The particular target group of design engineers get equipped with fundamentally important sustainability knowledge enabling them to include sustainability considerations in their products and systems design. Eco-design is positioned as a key lever towards achieving sustainable product-service systems.