Can process management enable sustainable new product development? : an empirical investigation of supplier and customer involvement in fuzzy front end of sustainable product development

Sustainable product development (SPD) has received increasing attention by scholars and practitioners recently. A challenge for them is to incorporate sustainability in the firms’ fuzzy front end (FFE) to assess sustainability impacts of proposed products at early stage. The paper presents a research framework that shows the critical process interfaces in supplier and customer involvement in the FFE of SPD. The novelty of the paper lies in the postulation that SPD requires discontinues change in the supply chain and/or customer context, and that this change only can be made when the external interfaces are sufficiently supported in the FFE process.