Laying the Foundations for a Methodology to Integrate and Manage the Corporate Social Responsibility Issues of a Company in the Product Development Process

Abstract

Manufacturing companies are urged to take responsibility for their impacts on the environment and on society, to contribute to a more sustainable development. The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has therefore gained a lot of interest in the last decades. The Product Development Process (PDP) is a key activity in the operationalization of CSR in a company. However, little is known about the capabilities needed for companies to integrate and manage their CSR issues in their PDP. Therefore, this article aims at contributing to (1) identifying the capabilities to integrate and manage the CSR issues during the PDP, and (2) providing a maturity model to assess the level of capabilities for the integration of the CSR issues in the PDP. Insofar as CSR aims at contributing to sustainable development, the existing literature on capabilities for integrating sustainability in the PDP has been studied and taken as a basis to identify the capabilities for integrating and managing CSR in the PDP. A maturity model has then been built based on these capabilities. This contribution lays the foundation for a methodology to support companies in the improvement of their maturity level in terms of CSR-PDP interaction.