The need for innovation management and decision guidance in sustainable process design

The role of engineering science is to generate step changing technological solutions, leading to paradigm shifts in innovation. But today, the path from discovery to innovation, and from innovation to industrial uptake has become more convoluted: the increased understanding of the wider impacts of technologies on environment and society has led to more complex and strict regulatory frameworks. New technological solutions must address a progressively larger number of simultaneous goals, among them is the contribution of technologies to sustainable development. To facilitate the success of translation of novel technologies into innovation and industrial adoption within Europe, the authors advocate an innovation management and a new decision-making approach, which promotes holistic understanding of economic, environmental and societal challenges that a new technology must respond to. The MEASURE approach was developed based on experiences in sustainability assessment and innovation management within previous collaborative projects, and the outcomes of two stakeholder workshops. It allows comparison of alternative solutions, understanding of their benefits and drawbacks, as well as the evaluation of the (remaining) distance to a defined target and, as a result, robust holistic decision-making for innovative sustainable process design. We propose an iterative stage-and-gate approach coupled with sustainability assessment and multi-criteria decision analysis. The paper exemplifies how development teams could set their own most informative criteria, the necessary gates and key targets. It is mainly intended to support technology-driven collaborative research projects between industry and academia within the European Horizon 2020 framework programme, as being an integral part of the Innovation Union Flagship Initiative. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.