For a long time, competition between products, services, systems and technological solutions has been based almost exclusively on the technical performance of products.
In recent years, new criteria have appeared on the markets, leading technology companies to increasingly take into account elements of “responsibility” in the design of their products. These elements are either the result of legal or regulatory obligations or of their increasing consideration by customers in their decisions to purchase products or choose their suppliers.
Additional objectives
In addition to overall corporate governance and business ethics, specific objectives are increasingly integrated into product design. These objectives relate to the entire product life cycle: design, raw materials, manufacturing, transport, use, disposal or recycling. These are essentially:
- Reduction of environmental impact: air or soil pollution, water contamination
- Carbon footprint reduction: total amount of greenhouse gases generated over the life of the product, measured in carbon dioxide equivalents
- Energy consumption
These criteria appear more and more explicitly in the selection criteria mentioned by clients and in their specifications.
They are of course both a constraint and a technical challenge for companies in the design of their products, services, systems or solutions. Technical performance objectives and product responsibility objectives will have to coexist or be reconciled. For example, how do you create a product that is high performance, very light and low energy consuming at the same time?
A new field of opportunities
These new criteria constitute at the same time a new field of opportunities to differentiate oneself from the competition on all markets, whether civil or military:
- In terms of energy consumption in a world where energy is becoming increasingly expensive and can represent a very important item in the cost of using products for customers. It is well known, for example, that one of the main criteria for choosing an aircraft model by an airline is its fuel consumption, and in particular that of the engines it is equipped with.
- In terms of environmental impact in a world that is becoming increasingly aware of these issues and is passing on these concerns from consumer products to the upstream end of all industrial chains.
