This thesis investigates the potential of User-Centered Design (UCD) and Agile to support Strategic Sustainable Development (SSD) practice in product and product-service system (PSS) design. UCD tools and concepts are used to support stakeholder and needs research. Agile provides process support for collaboration and resilience. SSD tools and concepts are used to define and work within the system boundaries for sustainability. All three practices are combined in an innovation approach that supports collaborative and cross-functional design teams as they develop products and PSS. Design teams using this approach will work to satisfy the needs of customers while considering the needs of all non-customer stakeholders and the ecosphere. The full-systems context emphasized in the approach will support innovation and encourage design teams to consider services as complements to, or substitutes for, physical products.

Many literatures have shown that needs last longer than any specific solutions, so understanding of customer needs seems a crucial factor in early Product-Service System (PSS) development. Nowadays, many western companies, especially manufacturing focused companies, have realized the difficulty of understanding market needs. In this thesis, a new Value-Driven Needfinding methodology for manufacturing company to apply in certain markets was investigated. To further demonstrate the implementation of the proposed methodology, a case study involving Volvo Construction Equipment exploring value-orient needs in Chinese market is showed. At the end, by providing the scenarios comparison, a PSS conceptual design will be illustrated to show the utilization of the customer needs, then opportunities for company future provision towards sustainability based on early PSS development will be discussed. / Providing added value to standalone products by adding services is at the core of Product-Service Systems (PSS) offered in manufacturing companies. Providing PSS requires a change not only in the way products are sold, but also in the way they are designed and developed. The way of understanding and capturing customer needs often fall outside the early phase of designing integration solution in traditional manufacturing company. The aim of the thesis is to investigate the needfinding for early phase of PSS design, methods and tools proposed to improve the need collection and analysis process. This academic work was performed through the close collaboration with Volvo Construction Equipment which is looking for opportunities to provide Product-Service System in the Chinese market. The thesis group firstly reviewed theory of needfinding, and then the importance of value was brought out. The methodology of Value-Driven Needfinding (VDN) was introduced to facilitate the early PSS development. By deriving needs from an adding value standpoint, this methodology is not only focused only on needs intended as “Voice of the customer” but rather as needs expressed as “Value Adding Activities”. Thus, these value-based needs can reveal some functions for potential system solution development. A case study involved with Chinese customers’ needs is described to demonstrate the application of VDN. Two scenarios comparison were presented to evaluate the sustainable influence between provision of current solutions and new PSS solution. During discussion part, the application of VDN, the Chinese market preferences and the contribution of VDN for early PSS design from sustainable perspectives are discussed. At the end, three conclusions supported the contirbution of VDN applied for manufacturing company to carry out PSS development at early stage are showed. / 0736278002, Pohlmesgatan 27 B lgh 1208 371 40

Today’s societal development is not sustainable. The transportation sector has the potential role to be a tremendous lever for sustainability due to its central position in the societal structure as well as for the current unsustainable trends that occur in this system. Recommendations to public transportation providers were made by highlighting the main existing gaps between the current transportation system and an envisioned future transportation system that could exist in a sustainable society. To highlight these gaps, multiple perspectives were considered. These perspectives were enabled by e.g. User Journey Maps at the individual level and a holistic perspective over the broader urban transport system. The premise is that in order to increase use rates of public transportation, there is a need to better assess and address urban travellers' needs when commuting. For providers to have a strategic, stepwise approach and to be able to bring the public transportation system towards sustainability, the authors recommended that public transportation providers prioritize and implement future actions aligned with the three prioritization questions presented at the strategic level of the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development and by defining a criterion that would emphasize that the users’ needs of importance highlighted in the study are fulfilled.

This thesis investigates the P2P carsharing user experience. The intention of this investigation is to increase the adoption and uptake of P2P carsharing in existing and future markets because of its benefits to the environment, the local economy and its accruement of social capital. We see P2P carshar- ing as a key means to creating a sustainable urban transportation solution. We started by doing a web review of P2P carsharing followed by a system- atic analysis in which we categorized each platforms’ key attributes. With this information we created two infographics. The first displays existent platforms and their different attributes. The second illustrates the customer journey. We then conducted a survey between April 6 and May 14, 2012, receiving 206 responses from borrowers, owners and people who have not yet used the service. Although the survey was open to anyone, users in the US, France, Germany, Spain and Sweden were targeted. The survey pro- vides demographic information about P2P carsharing users who were found to be young, highly educated, well-off working professionals. Their trans- portation habits and needs, especially as relating to P2P carsharing were also found. After collating this information we partitioned respondents into: Owners, Borrowers, Prospective Owners, Prospective Borrowers, and then orthogonally into US Users and European Users. We then created user pro- files and a mix of short and longer-term multi-stakeholder design chal- lenges for stakeholders; whose work, building off of ours, will we hope, foster innovations that make P2P carsharing a ubiquitous mobility solution.

This thesis project extends current research on how Product-Service/Systems (PSS) increase the competitiveness of what businesses provide to society. In particular, when the significant stakeholders who create value, structured as a network, are also involved in the co-development of the value proposition. Applying the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD), this study looks at how the early stages of a strategic planning process for sustainability could improve this co-development of PSS. The field research helped to understand the particularities of co-developing PSS and how the planning process could be adapted using the FSSD. As a result, theoretical dimensions, and general guidelines to put these into practice, are recommended in a model. The theoretical dimensions were field tested and refined. It was discovered that when creating the aspirational goals of the network, including other perspectives, in addition to companies and the customer’s, could expand the perception of value available to be provided. To do so is proposed a systematic understanding of the situation, and its socio-ecological context, where the activities of the value-based network of stakeholders are performed.

Manufacturing companies have traditionally focused their design and development activities on realizing technical and engineered aspects of physical artifacts based on performance requirements. The ever-changing business climate, with its increased pace during the past decades, has forced industries to continuously innovate their approach toward the development of new products. Pressured also by global competition, manufacturing companies need to reconsider the traditional concept of realizing value via goods production, and shift towards realizing value through product-service combinations. Companies have begun to recognize that gaining competitive advantage and expanding market shares is not achievable purely through continuous technical improvements. Rather, it is necessary to develop a closer relationship to the customer to gain a deeper understanding of expectations, needs, and perceived value. From a development perspective, the overarching problem within complex systems such as those in which cars, aircraft, and excavators are manufactured, or healthcare is provided, is that the focus on customer value is likely to become blurred since it is difficult to understand the impact a change in any single component in the overall system has on value, and to determine a new function’s impact on future scenarios. The main goals of this thesis are to provide an understanding of key challenges when considering the value different design alternatives provide in the conceptual phases of product development taking the automotive industry as case study, and to explore how to support a multi-disciplinary design team in making value-conscious decisions when dealing with new product-service offerings. The research approach has involved data collection through participation in, and facilitation of, product-service design workshops in the automotive industry. Also, it has involved follow-up meetings and interviews, as well as a review of literature on state-of-the-art methods in early conceptual design phases, which describes the advantages and disadvantages of the different frameworks. The primary finding of the study is that determination of the impact of different PSS design options on customer value becomes more challenging since new elements are introduced (e.g., new business models and services). The design team requires more holistic competences in order to more fully understand changing contexts; and new methods and tools are needed in order to establish a base to define, discuss and assess what “uncontested customer value” is, and link it to the different product-service elements of the system. Secondly, this thesis proposes a conceptual approach for value simulation and assessment of different design options, where the iterative use of personas and scenario generation is combined with value modeling and computer-based simulation techniques, enabling a quick “what-if” analysis of the various options, facilitating the identification of promising combinations of product and service elements that provide higher customer value.

Global challenges such as increasingly competitive markets, low-cost competition, shorter lead time demands, and high quality/value output are transforming the business model of the company to focus beyond the performance requirements. In order to meet these challenges, companies are highly concerned with the customer perceived value, which is to connect the product with the customer in a better way and become more proactive to fulfil the customer needs, via function-oriented business models and Product-Service Systems. In literature, the conceptual phase is distinguished as the most critical phase of the product development process. Many authors have recognized the improvement of design in the conceptual phase as the mean to deliver a successful product in the market. At the decision gate, where concepts are selected for further development, the design team needs knowledge/data about the long-term consequences of their early decision, to see how changes in design propagate to the entire lifecycle of the product. The main goal of the thesis is to describe how the design of Product-Service Systems in the conceptual phase can be improved through the use of a data-driven approach. The latter provides an opportunity to enhance decision making and to provide better support at the early development phase. The study highlights how data are managed and used in current industrial setting and indicates the room for improvement with current practices. The thesis further provides guidelines to efficiently use data into the modelling and simulation activities to increase design knowledge. As a result of this study, a data-driven approach emerged to support the early design decision.  The thesis presents initial descriptive study findings from the empirical investigations, showing a model-based approach that creates awareness about the value of a new design concept, thus acting as a key enabler to use data in design. This will create a link between the product engineering characteristic to the high-level attributes of customer satisfaction and provider’s long-term profitability. The preliminary results indicate that the application of simulation models to frontload the early design stage creates awareness about how performance can lead to value creation, helping multidisciplinary teams to perform quick trade-off and what-if analysis on design configurations. The proposed framework shows how data from various sources are used through a chain of simulations to understand the entire product lifecycle. The proposed approach holds a potential to improve the key performance indicators for Product-Service Systems development: lead time, design quality, cost and most importantly deliver a value-added product to the customer.

Industrialization and globalization of companies has promoted fast, easy and profitable business solutions. A linear business model (LBM) is seen as the most common way to do business. However, recent studies have enlightened how LBMs are detrimental to the health and biological cycles of the earth and its inhabitants. To prevent this, circular business models (CBM) are being introduced as a feasible while still profitable solution. CBMs are defined by Oghaze & Mostaghel, (2018), as the “…rationale of how an organisation creates, delivers, and captures value with slowing, closing, or narrowing flows of the resource loops”, as they base their business on products and services designed to close or slowing the resource loops, decreasing the overall need of virgin resources.  However, to make these major changes in the current way of designing products and services has to be made, taking into consideration the change in design objectives from a linear to a circular model. Today, there are many circular design methods (DM) developed by academia to aid designers in designing sustainable products and services, however, the uptake of such DMs in the industry is quite low. Such a low level of uptake is often due to a poor fit between the DM and the context it is adopted in, which does not aid its seamless integration in existing processes.  Therefore, this research aims to identify DM characteristics that will aid industries to be adopted or adapted by companies transitioning towards CBMs. To do so, three research questions were developed: i) What are the most critical internal and external drivers in a company that enable the successful adoption of a circular design method?  ii) What are the contextual barriers that companies encounter when adopting or adapting circular design methods? iii) How can the design method adopted or adapted be evaluated to improve their implementation in a company? To answer these research questions, a survey was initially carried out, and subsequent interviews were conducted amongst participants of five different companies from various sectors and expertise. The survey and interviews were grounded in previous research concerning types of CBM and different types of barriers and drivers influencing the adoption of circular DMs.  The result from the survey indicates that the ability to make trade-offs when confronted with sustainability aspects, management commitment to a CBM, good communication and sharing of environmental knowledge, both through different departments and with external actors like suppliers, as well as allocating resources such as time, personnel, funds, and having clear business incentives are needed to promote the use of circular DMs. From the interviews, it was also found that barriers to the effective use of DMs are lack of environmental knowledge throughout the supply chain and wrong identification of actors in the supply chain as well as limited communication with external actors. Furthermore, the research revealed several characteristics of the DMs such as simplicity, flexibility and informativity need to be adapted to leverage and overcome the identified contextual drivers and barriers respectively, for their successful deployment within the companies.

Les travaux présentés dans ce mémoire s’inscrivent dans une problématique d’aide à l’élaboration d’offres, en adoptant le point de vue de l’entreprise soumissionnaire lors d’un processus de réponse à appel d’offres. Ces offres peuvent concerner indifféremment des produits, des services ou des systèmes produit-service (PSS). Dans le cadre de nos travaux, nous regroupons cette diversité sous le terme « PvSS ». Nous nous intéressons donc à la problématique suivante : «Comment maîtriser et assister l’élaboration d’offres en réponse à appel d’offres ?». Notre première contribution consiste en un cadre de modélisation et d’exploitation des connaissances. Ce cadre est composé d’un modèle générique de structure d’offre, ainsi que d’un modèle d’exploitation des connaissances. Le modèle générique de structure d’offre permet de modéliser à la fois (1) la solution technique (ce que l’entreprise propose au client) et (2) son processus de réalisation (comment l’entreprise fournit cette solution). Il intègre également les notions de contexte d’élaboration, d’exigences client, d’indicateurs d’évaluation (coût, délai de réalisation, confiance, etc.) et de risques. Ce modèle est formalisé et exploité à l’aide d’une taxonomie, d’un problème de satisfaction de contraintes (CSP) et de raisonnement à partir de cas (CBR). Notre deuxième contribution porte sur la caractérisation d’une méthodologie de déploiement et d’exploitation du cadre proposé. Cette méthodologie, appelée ISIEM, intègre des phases d’adaptation et de déploiement du cadre en entreprise (phases d’Initialisation, Spécialisation et Implémentation), mais également des phases d’utilisation (phases d’Exploitation et Mise à jour). Les travaux présentés dans ce mémoire s’inscrivent dans le cadre du projet ANR OPERA. Nos deux contributions sont illustrées par un cas d’étude provenant de l’une des entreprises partenaires du projet. / The work presented in this thesis deals with assistance in bid elaboration, by adopting the point of view of the bidder during a tendering response process. These bids may concern products, services or product-service systems (PSS). As part of our work, we group this diversity under the term“PvSS”. We are therefore interested in the following problem: “How to master and assist in bid elaboration in response to calls for tenders?”. Our first contribution is a framework for modelling and exploiting knowledge. This framework is composed of a generic model of bid structure, as well as a knowledge exploitation model. The generic model of bid structure allows the modelling of both (1) the technical solution (what the company proposes to the customer) and (2) its realization process (how the company provides this solution to the customer). It also integrates the elaboration context, customer requirements, the evaluation indicators (cost, delivery time, confidence, etc.) and risks. This model is formalized and exploited using a taxonomy, a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) and case-based reasoning (CBR). Our second contribution deals with the characterization of a methodology for deploying and exploiting the proposed framework. This methodology, called ISIEM, includes phases of adaptation and deployment of the framework in enterprise (Initialization, Specialization and Implementation phases), but also phases of use (Exploitation and Maintenance phases). The work presented in this thesis is part of the ANR OPERA project. Our two contributions are illustrated by a case study from one of the project’s partner companies.

The digital revolution has led to a drastic transformation of electronics manufacturing industries globally. A growing number of companies are continually investing in digital technologies to remain competitive. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Big data, Robotics, etc. and smart devices have been widely adopted to improve efficiency, connectivity, and productivity of businesses. To cope with increased competition and customer demands, electronics manufacturing companies have broadened their interest in service innovation. However, companies pursuing a servitization strategy often lack an established framework i.e. method and tools to design new services. Besides, research indicates that existing frameworks with the potential to support this development are not contextualized to the electronics manufacturing industry. This design study, therefore, evaluates and proposes how the Integrative PSS approach can be adapted to suit the electronics manufacturing context to support services. The findings suggest that some models used in this approach were found to be unfavorable in the development of services. In such cases, the study contributes by providing suggestions on what models to adapt and how in the integrative PSS approach to support electronic manufacturing companies in their servitization process. The artifact is an exaptation since a known solution is extended to solve a problem in a new context and of the type instantiation.