Towards a Sustainable Innovation Process: Integrating Lean and Sustainability Principles.

Many companies are heavily investing resources to innovate faster and smarter in order to gain or retain a competitive advantage. Nevertheless, defining and deploying a sustainable innovation vision still represents a challenge to most companies, as a deep change of mindset is required to reflect going beyond the design, development, production and distribution of new products, to also consider their disposal, recycling or reuse, as part of their end-to-end product life cycle. Therefore, this paper aims to: (1) highlight the relevance of including lean and sustainability principles in the early design and conceptualization phases, (2) explain how lean and sustainability can bring benefits when applied as an integrated system considering three axes: the economic, the social and the environmental, and (3) share a case study providing insights of a successful application.