New product development: examining its evolution and the introduction of environmental issues

Abstract

Environmental impacts have required a greater commitment of the companies in the search for sustainable solutions for the improvement of the process of new product development (NPD). In this context, the objective of this work is to examine 50 NPD structures, to identify if those structures have considered environmental issues. The publications were located in different databases were accessed to retrieved the publications and a systematic literature review was conducted. The results indicate that there are few NPD structures that take into account environmental issues in order to reduce impact of their product and process. In addition, there are differences in the scope of these structures according to the area of knowledge that proposes them as well as differences in the distribution of the phases in the NPD process according to the characteristics of the developed product. Conclusively, the NPD structures have been constantly developed in the literature. Nevertheless, the integration of environmental issues into NPD structures can be seen in more recent publications, in which such structures seem to minimize the environmental impacts during the product life cycle.