Derive Criteria for a Selection of Sustainability Techniques in SMEs Based on a Literature Review

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face the challenge of implementing sustainability aspects in their products in order to remain competitive and meet the standards set by governments. The necessary methods and tools (for simplicity, referred to as techniques in the following) are mainly used by the industry, which has sufficient resources for its research and development department and sufficient skilled personnel. The multitude of existing sustainability methods overwhelms non-specialised personnel and poses a further challenge to their application. This results in the need to implement sustainability techniques into the product development process (PDP) of SMEs, considering their needs. The motivation of this work is to derive terminology from the literature reviewed to identify a pool of techniques suitable for use in SMEs and thus to support these companies in their product development process by enabling them to select suitable techniques for a specific task more quickly. Furthermore, this work provides the basis for an interactive filtering process that enables the context-sensitive use of techniques. In this work, criteria from the literature for a technique selection were reviewed and analysed to clarify the terminology used and to refine the criteria for a first technique selection. This will lead to a pool of instruments that can be used in SME product development.