Setting up new product development for environmentally sustainable innovation
Author Identifier (ORCID)
Aron O′Cass: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0127-3759
Abstract
Academic Summary: This special issue advances an actionable understanding of how firms set up new product development (NPD) to deliver environmentally sustainable innovation. To organize this challenge, we introduce the CORE framework, which conceptualizes environmentally sustainable NPD along four interdependent domains: Conceptualization, Orchestration, Realization, and Environment. The CORE framework contributes by recasting environmentally sustainable innovation as a cross-phase product innovation management problem, showing how front-end opportunity formation, development-stage coordination, market realization, and contextual contingencies jointly shape sustainable innovation outcomes. Using this process-oriented lens, we synthesize prior research and show how the seven articles in this special issue extend understanding across these four domains. Specifically, the articles provide new evidence on customer co-creation in the front end of NPD, agile control and sustainability tensions in innovation portfolios, supplier concentration and substantive versus symbolic green innovation, the CSR–firm value link and the role of NPD versus marketing, the orchestration of innovation ecosystems to transform latent use contexts into manifest ones, and the cross-context contingencies of environmentally sustainable product innovation success. Building on this foundation, we identify key knowledge gaps and develop a CORE-based future research agenda that highlights promising questions across the four domains and the linkages between them. Managerial Summary: Firms face growing pressure to develop products that are not only commercially successful but also environmentally sustainable. This special issue shows that success does not depend on isolated green initiatives, but on how firms set up their new product development (NPD) process from the start. We propose the CORE framework to help managers think about four connected areas: Conceptualization, Orchestration, Realization, and Environment. In practice, this means identifying sustainable opportunities early, coordinating functions and partners effectively during development, turning sustainability efforts into credible customer value, and adapting decisions to the regulatory, competitive, and institutional context. The articles in this special issue offer several practical lessons. They show that sustainability can encourage customer co-creation in the front end of NPD, that portfolio controls must balance agility and sustainability goals, and that supplier dependence can limit substantive green innovation. The findings also suggest that firms can scale growth and sustainability by orchestrating innovation ecosystems that turn latent opportunities into markets. In addition, markets respond more positively when firms embed sustainability in NPD rather than relying mainly on marketing claims. Overall, environmentally sustainable innovation requires aligned governance, cross-functional collaboration, stakeholder integration, ecosystem orchestration, and credible execution across the full NPD process.
Keywords
Environmentally sustainable innovation, green innovation, literature review, sustainability, sustainable new product development
Document Type
Editorial
Date of Publication
5-1-2026
Volume
43
Issue
3
Publication Title
Journal of Product Innovation Management
Publisher
Wiley
School
School of Business and Law
Copyright
free_to_read
First Page
383
Last Page
399
Comments
O′Cass, A., & Heidenreich, S. (2026). Setting up new product development for environmentally sustainable innovation. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 43(3), 383–399. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.70044