A decision-making toolbox for sustainability and circularity in technology development

Technological innovation designs the world of tomorrow. Through technology research and development (R&D), engineers, designers, and researchers develop new materials, product capabilities, and production processes that are essential for the Circular Economy (CE), a promising pathway towards a more sustainable society. If properly designed for CE, tech-nologies can enable gains in efficiency, reduce environmental impacts, and retain the value of resources.

Manufacturing companies bear much of the responsibility for developing and imple-menting these technologies in a responsible and sustainable manner. Ultimately, companies decide how these technologies are applied into everyday products and systems, thus shap-ing how circular and sustainable they will be. And although sustainability and circularity might be the newest additions to the decision criteria used in R&D projects, they are far from the only ones. R&D engineers need to balance them with business viability, technical feasibility, risk, and more. In this balancing act, they often face dilemmas or trade-off situations. As companies increasingly prioritise environmental sustainability and circularity in R&D, they require new tools to make sense of the risks and benefits of new technologies and decision-making support to navigate trade-offs.

Therefore, the aim of this PhD research is to support the integration of sustainability and circularity into technology R&D through an assessment and decision-making toolbox. The research followed the Design Research Methodology with an Action Research ap-proach. A variety of methods were used, including systematic literature reviews and synthe-sis, interviews, workshops, and quasi-experiments. The research was conducted in close collaboration with Grundfos, a large manufacturing company in the water industry. The tools were also evaluated in other contexts and industries, such as aerospace and medical de-vices, as well as with academics and consultants.

The toolbox – which is the main result of this thesis – includes a screening tool for new technologies and a decision support tool for trade-offs in technology R&D:

• The screening tool, called Value-Impact Analysis (VIA), takes a workshop approach combining life cycle thinking and the notion of value retention strategies in CE, tailored to the technology R&D process. It also features future scenarios together with both qualitative and semiquantitative assessment and a novel visualisation of results.

• The trade-off support tool, called Multiple Narrative Decision Analysis (MNDA), builds on top of non-compensatory multiple criteria decision analysis tools. It applies an innovative approach where narratives take centre stage, together with a system-atic sensitivity analysis.

Evidence from extensive evaluations indicate that these tools are useful additions to the arsenal of R&D engineers, enabling them to better understand, discuss, analyse, inter-pret, visualise, and communicate the sustainability and circularity potential of new technol-ogies. Other than the key contribution to manufacturing companies through practical tools, this thesis also expands current scholarly knowledge and debate about CE trade-offs and Design for Sustainability more broadly, particularly regarding the role of scenarios and nar-ratives in assessment and decision-making.