A data-driven Product Market System framework enabling Sustainable decision-making
Creators: name: Mancinelli, Raimondo
Publisher: name: University of Surrey
Year: 2024

description: Sustainable business decision-making often lacks holistic considerations, with sustainable business models primarily focusing on material factors, such as green-house gases emission reduction or material circularity and overlooking ethics and intangible options like product-service systems. Several obstacles hinder sustainable decision-making: the business imperative for perpetual market growth, an absence of ethical considerations, a shortfall in methodologies for assessing the impacts of business models, a limited set of indicators, a lack of transparent and replicable decision-making processes, among others. Addressing these limitations requires rethinking sustainable businesses, challenging the existing economic model, and redefining sustainable businesses as active, responsible participants in society that create and offer solutions to meet societal needs.<br>
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description: The Product-Market System (PMS) framework has been developed in the research to address the lack of sustainability assessments in the business context. A combination of literature reviews and case studies was utilised to define and test the framework. This involved identifying the domains that sustainable businesses should focus on, study the sustainable business model concept as a potential subject of the assessment and identifying its limit for such application. The identified gaps have guided the development of the Product-Market System framework. It enables the evaluation of product or service value propositions, encompassing both material artifacts and intangible considerations, on the sustainability of the wider system by determining whether the product contributes to their satisfaction or exacerbates existing challenges.<br>
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description: The testing of the Product-Market System framework involved several case studies with both qualitative and quantitative assessments. The research was conducted in close collaboration with the industrial partner, Costain. The proposed assessment involves identifying the fundamental needs and satisfiers of human and non-human actors within the product-market system and determining whether the alternatives contribute to their satisfaction or exacerbate existing challenges.<br>
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description: The acquired knowledge has been organised into a Sustainability Assessment process, where the Product-Market System serves as the subject of assessment. A set of qualitative and quantitative methods have been developed to support practitioners throughout the different phases of the assessment. The research has shown potential in effectively reconciling business priorities with stakeholder needs – covering people, society, and the environment – when designing new market propositions for sustainability and integrating external stakeholder values into decision-making, including those from underrepresented categories. Although the full assessment is resource and data intensive, there are learning points and methodologies within it that business practitioners can apply both in isolation and as part of the full assessment. <br>
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description: Two main contributions to knowledge have been identified. Firstly, the Product-Market System framework enables the evaluation of business models by considering both the material artifact and intangible considerations, such as pure services or product-service systems. Secondly, the developed numerical method allows including stakeholder personal preferences as value preferences in the evaluation. This ensures that the decision-making process is fair and equitable by incorporating feedback from all relevant stakeholders’ groups, including underrepresented categories.<br>
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description: Preliminary testing of the process and numerical method have shown promise in its approach. Future studies can expand the quantitative assessments to establish an accurate, reliable, quick, and comprehensive sustainability assessment process for general business applications. The aspiration is that this research will inspire study in the field of sustainability assessment for the business context to address the existing gaps in embedding sustainability into decision-making practices<br>