The challenges of developing sustainable products: adopting modular platforms in the context of high-variety complex products
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".