The challenges of developing sustainable products: adopting modular platforms in the context of high-variety complex products

In today’s rapidly evolving market, which increasingly favours sustainable products, manufacturing companies must turn to the development of modular product platforms. However, the complexity arising from developing complex products and the increasing demand for mass personalization brings forth multiple challenges. This preliminary study identifies and ranks the challenges encountered in designing modular product platforms to meet a demand for high-variety sustainable products. A two-pronged methodology combines semi-structured and structured interviews with ten experts from three companies. This approach reveals seven categories of challenges. The results show that specific challenges become more critical depending on the company’s context and maturity. Thus, addressing the seven groups of challenges requires consideration of the particular situation of each company. Identifying these groups of challenges will allow for developing diagnostic frameworks and product development strategies to address them in future research. Furthermore, integrating interventions more strongly focused on sustainable product design remains to be fully developed within the processes and tools present in current product development strategies.