SUSTAINABLE NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT: THE ROLE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL SPECIALIST AND ENVIRONMENTAL MARKETING STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Companies in the twenty first century are exposed to a variety of pressures to respond to environmental issues and responding to these pressures affects several aspects of business such as purchasing, marketing and logistics. Conventional wisdom regarding the incorporation of sustainability posits sustainability as a tradeoff with other corporate goals; however, during the last decade, this paradigm has been challenged by a view that proposes this incorporation as a complementary strategy, or even as an opportunity. Understanding how firms integrate environmental issues into their corporate agendas and how these integration strategies affect performance has become very important. The process of sustainable new product development (SNPD) is one of the core areas that these strategies focus on in order to achieve economic and environmental sustainability. This thesis investigates the integration of environmental specialists into SNPD teams and the relative influence of motivational factors of environmental strategy development and the structural relationship of how they affect the performance of SNPD. It relies on two main research streams: work on sustainable management and conventional new product development. The first essay examines the integration of environmental specialists into new product development teams that are composed of several other functional specialists such as marketing, manufacturing, and R&D personnel, and its impact on SNPD performance across three stages: (1) concept development (CD) (e.g., the generation and refinement of new product ideas, market analysis, preparation of product concepts), (2) product development (PD) (e.g., actual technical product development, execution of prototype tests, test marketing), and (3) product commercialization (PC) (e.g., market launches, training, after-sales support). In this paper, we draw upon resource dependency theory as our theoretical background. We present evidence that, integrating an environmental specialist into a new product team has a positive influence on SNPD project performance beyond what the traditional members of such a team would accomplish. Through analyzing this relationship across the stages of SNPD, we gained a clearer picture of the effectiveness of this integration. In particular, the integration of the environmental specialist was more effective on SNPD project performance in the final stage of the SNPD process when the product was being launched. This effect is even greater for high-innovative projects. The second essay investigates the different motivations that drive firms to adopt environmental marketing strategies and their relative impact on new product advantage and SNPD performance. Theoretically grounded in Stakeholder Theory and the Resource - Based View of the Firm Theory, a conceptual framework was developed that portrays the antecedents and consequences of environmental marketing strategy. In regard to the antecedents of environmental marketing strategy, we examined the drivers of environmental marketing strategy development: public concern, regulatory pressures and market opportunity. The results showed that developing environmental strategies that exceed regulations (proactive strategies) leads to better new product performance than only adhering to regulations (reactive strategies). In addition, the results showed that commitment from top management becomes critical only for proactive strategies, not for reactive strategies. Finally, in regard to the consequences, we found that environmental marketing strategies lead to new product advantage and in turn, better sustainable new product performance. This thesis fills a gap in the literature with respect to the lack of conceptual and empirical contributions on the integration of sustainability issues into the new product development process, by aiming to provide new insights into how firms are integrating environmental specialists into their new product development teams and by extending our knowledge of how firms develop environmental marketing strategies and how these strategies affect new product performance.