Sustainability in R&D: This Group is Considering How Sustainability May Be Effectively Incorporated into R&D. the Goals Are to Identify Best Practices for the Use of Sustainability Assessments, Establish Baseline Criteria and Methodologies for the Use of Such Tools, and Develop a Framework for Building Sustainability into New Products and Processes

Until recently, the of financial reports was the overriding measure of a company's success. Now, though, economic and political forces are pushing more and more organizations to measure performance against the bottom of people, planet, and profits. In this context, sustainability--which can have profound impacts in all three arenas--is an increasingly central challenge. The Research-on-Research working group on sustainability in R&D was initiated to address this reality. Because R&D is intimately involved in ensuring the environmental, societal, and economic performance of a company's products and processes, the working group concluded that sustainability begins in R&D and is core to its very practice. From designing new products and processes to meeting regulations relative to safety and the environment, R&D is continuously driving change in this area. Because the bottom concept integrates these key parameters, we adopted triple-bottom-line performance as our working definition for sustainability. One of the challenges of considering the triple bottom line as a measure of performance is that providing clear metrics for social and environmental performance can be difficult. Social metrics, for instance, will often relate to the benefit the customer derives from the product, but they also may relate to societal and community benefits derived from both the product itself and the associated production processes, including such benefits as jobs and the innovative solutions to societal problems. In the past, the drive to meet regulatory and green standards would have resulted in passing this cost on to consumers, thereby moving a valuable product out of the reach of the poorer consumer. However, the emphasis today is on developing an innovative solution either in the design or choice of materials that prevents such trade-offs. In considering these questions, the group developed a model based on Six Sigma's Supplier, Input, Process, Output, Customer (SIPOC) tool. The modified SIPOC presented here was developed and refined through discussion with participating companies as a way to map all the elements in an R&D effort focused on sustainable products and processes. This model provides a way of thinking about sustainability that can be integrated into existing R&D management methods, new-product development (NPD) processes, and stage-gate systems (Figure 1). Suppliers in this model range from government agencies, which provide regulatory inputs, to environmental consultants, who offer expertise on environmental impacts and tools for measuring them. The inputs provided by each type of supplier help determine the level of sustainability of the product and process. The R&D organization must then create the output needed for marketing to customers and for regulatory compliance. This specialized SIPOC for sustainability is designed to help companies organize their thinking around the role R&D plays in moving toward a sustainable future. Driving Sustainable NPD Processes The work of a sustainability-focused NPD team will be driven by a number of forces, some of which may be unique to sustainability efforts, while others are common to all NPD efforts. These forces--inputs to the NPD process--emanate from a range of suppliers, from internal company processes to government agencies to market forces and external consultants. As with other NPD efforts, the new products proposed by a sustainability-focused NPD team will in some measure be driven by the value chain and the needs of either the customer or the customer's customer. For example, the customer for a packaging company might be a major food producer who has been directed by its large customers to reduce packaging. The packaging company can work with its customer--the food producer--to understand the demands originating farther down the demand chain and to develop a project plan that can be integrated into the stage-gate in a way that meets the needs of both the food producer and its customers. …