A product innovation toolkit for green business in South East Asia

A product innovation toolkit for green business in South East Asia

Crul, M.R.M.
Hong Long, N.

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Engineering

2011-11-09

Most of the available Sustainable Product Innovation (SPI) approaches and tools have been developed in Western Europe, based upon European experiences. However, in South-East Asian economies like Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, needs are different and more immediate. Also the characteristics of the local companies and product innovation approaches differ because of specific local social, economic and industrial development aspects. Based upon the experiences of Delft University of Technology with Design for Sustainability within companies in, among others, East Africa, Central America, India and South-East Asia, an adapted approach and set of tools has been developed which fits better into the context of small and medium sized enterprises in SE Asian economies. This toolkit development is part of the activities in the EU SWITCH-ASIA project SPIN-VCL: Sustainable Product Innovation in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. VNCPC and AIT-VN have jointly set up the regional coordination office (“Green Office”) for the project in Hanoi. In the project 500 companies, mainly SMEs, participate to improve their products over the whole life cycle of the product and make them more sustainable, thus contributing to the objective of ‘Green Business’. The toolkit is organized according to the step-by-step approach that has been developed for SPIN implementation at the companies. This approach consists of four phases: Kick-off, product planning, product development and implementation. Other than most existing SPI approaches, the SPIN toolkit includes integrated approaches along the full line of possible company needs, ranging from benchmarking or redesign of existing products to development of fully new products and services, as well as strategic development approaches for branding and marketing of greener products. This extension is based on the explicit needs of SE Asian companies encountered in earlier projects. These approaches are all adapted to local circumstances and different circumstances such as micro-enterprises, SMEs, craft villages or larger companies. A needs assessment was performed to find out the requirements of the companies as well as the prospective experts to be trained in the approach, feeding into the theoretical and methodological development of the toolkit. Co-design sessions were organized with local experts to further fine-tune the toolkit. The preliminary results of company projects in which the toolkit is used show encouraging results, and further improvements are proposed for the next version of the toolkit.

sustainable product innovation
green business
methodological approaches
SMEs
toolkit

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:824883bb-ebce-4d59-a390-9410c37fbc48

APRSCP, The 10th Asia Pacific Roundtable for Sustainable Consumption and Production, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Nov. 9-11, 2011

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) The authors