Industry has been considered a major actor regarding the actions and changes needed to achieve sustainable development. Different approximations to the topic have been developed to face the challenges of having a more responsible production of goods and services. These approximations include cleaner production, green design, ecodesign, eco efficiency, design for sustainable behavior, sustainable design, and more recently concepts like circular economies among many more. In all these approaches, the attention has been mainly on the production side while consumption has been tackled indirectly. The majority of laws and ordinances that have motivated the emergence of these approaches have traditionally been oriented to producers. However, an European Union (EU) directive launched in October 2019, called “right to repair”, could change this paradigm, empowering consumers by giving them more possibilities of repairing their products instead of discarding them. This paper presents a preliminary discussion about the effects this directive might have on how we consume products now and how we will consume them in the future.

Sustainable product-service systems (PSSs) have proven to be a very good alternative for developing new business models and transforming traditional offers into sustainable ones. Environmental, social and economic benefits support the idea of developing this type of system. However, there are identified challenges that have stopped the expansion of the concept into the market. The framework that explains the principles and building blocks of a circular economy according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation can be an interesting lens to analyse the challenges companies faced when they wanted to implement a sustainable PSS. This framework is particularly useful to understand the internal and external forces companies are dealing with in a transformation from traditional business models to ones like sustainable PSSs that need special conditions of operation. Design for sustainability as an area of study will shift in the coming years to focus its attention on the requirements of circular economics as the paradigm of production and consumption. Sustainable products, services and systems will be developed according to the conditions established by those circular conditions.

Purpose: The objective of this paper is to measure the level of organizational wisdom of firms and verify its influence on the value they produce.Design/methodology/approach: This study seeks to establish linkage between organizational wisdom and value creation with the development of a new model based on the contributions of North's wisdom matrix and the Jordan and Jones model. The proposed model, using primary data from the Portuguese textile sector, is tested through recourse to a structural equation model.Findings: The results point to the conclusion that companies with high organizational wisdom do manage to improve their efficiency and effectiveness but this proves insufficient for actually increasing the level of value created when taking into account the industry's prevailing environment.Practical implications: Firms may apply this model to ascertain their level of organizational wisdom. This model may also be deployed to determine this organizational wisdom level for a set of companies (a company cluster) or even a sector.Originality/value: The main contribution of this paper stems from the explanatory value of the proposed model as it enables the measurement of a firm's organizational wisdom and its influence on the final value produced.

Design as a discipline has changed a lot during the last 50 years. The boundaries have been expanded partially to address the complexity of the problems we are facing nowadays. Areas like sustainable design, inclusive design, codesign, and social design among many more have emerged in response to the failures of the production and consumption system in place. In this context, social, environmental, and cultural trends have affected the way artefacts are designed, but the design process itself remains almost unchanged. In some sense, more criteria beyond economic concerns are now taken into consideration when social and environmental objectives are pursued in the design process, but the process to reach those objectives responds to the same stages and logic as in traditional approaches motivated only by economic aims. We propose in this paper an alternative way to understand and represent the design process, especially oriented to develop innovations that are aligned with the social, environmental, and cultural demands the world is facing now and it will face in the future. A new extended design process that is responsible for the consequences produced by the artefacts designed beyond the delivery of the solutions is proposed.

A renewed interest in the positive impact of design in industry during the last few years, especially regarding the measurement of that impact, has produced a number of studies and research in the field. All these studies have contributed significantly to increasing the acceptance of design in business, however it is still not totally clear what is the position of design within the business structure and its contributions to other functions in the organisation like innovation. In this paper we present the results of a National survey done in the UK between 2015 and 2016. The purpose of this paper is to provide academics, policy makers, and business support organisations with the insights from this study on the current use of design and potential relationship between design and innovation amongst UK firms today and to consider what this means for the future of design in business.

In this paper we discuss how design can have different meanings and uses in practice and what of those are related to innovation processes. The paper looks at diverse theoretical stances in regard to the meaning of design. Later on, the paper describes data collected through in-depth interviews with fifteen UK companies in the manufacturing, engineering, transport, urban living and digital services areas. The findings inform our understanding about definitions and uses of design. In addition, we identify some of the difficulties companies experience in measuring the value and contributions of design, and illustrate alternative methods companies use for that purpose. The paper concludes with a synthesis of the findings from this research.