Linking Industrial Ecology with Business Strategy: Creating Value for Green Product Design

As organizations practice environmental design, some discover green design positively impacts business performance. This article demonstrates how an organization can employ existing design methods and tools with the Kano technique to craft an environmental product design strategy that enhances its business strategy. These tools expand the toolbox of the industrial ecologist and enable the link between green design and business improvement. The Kano technique was developed in the 1980s to facilitate design of innovative products. We also introduce terminology and concepts such as “voices of the environment,”“environmental knowledge management,”“environmental profile,” and “environmental product attribute” in order to bridge the gap between industrial ecology and business concerns. To demonstrate how an organization can find the synergy between business value and environmental value, this article describes three activities and their corresponding tools and exhibits their use with industry examples. First, we present techniques by which designers can identify and prioritize customers and stakeholders who voice both environmental and business concerns. Second, we describe how voice‐of‐the‐customer translation techniques can be used to efficiently collect and translate data from these customers and stakeholders into critical environmental product and service attributes. Third, we discuss how the Kano technique can be used to connect green design to business strategy by making visible the variety of stakeholder and customer perceptions of these critical environmental attributes. Examples then demonstrate how those perceptions suggest appropriate approaches for integrating the critical environmental attributes into product and business strategy. Finally, we provide examples based on work done with General Electric Medical Systems (GEMS) to illustrate the design of products that improve environmental performance while adding greater perceived value for numerous customers along material‐flow value chains.