How Environmental Sustainability Impacts on Design Driven Product Strategies

Given the growing emergence of environmental problems, sustainability, and related issues have become strategic in firms aiming to achieve environmental improvement and profitability. This paper aims to investigate how environmental sustainability relates to a design-driven approach to product strategies, focusing the attention on companies which are strongly design-oriented. The objective is to examine to what extent design products in these companies are sustainable at the environmental level. This study is based on an empirical investigation of the Italian manufacturing companies associated to the Industrial Design Association (ADI, Associazione del Design Industriale), by following the entrepreneur’s perspective