A Strategic Planning Method to Guide Product—Service System Development and Implementation

Abstract

The societal and environmental crises in recent decades have promoted a social awareness of existing challenges to sustainability. While product–service systems (PSS) are considered a promising way to achieve a sustainable future, PSS features also create barriers that hinder the widespread implementation of PSS in society. Recent studies have therefore increasingly focused on the challenges to PSS implementation. However, the existing literature fails to facilitate a strategic plan or practical guide for PSS design activity despite taking into account the importance of visioning in PSS design. This paper, therefore, proposes a strategic planning method for PSS development and implementation by combining technology roadmap and transition scenarios. To illustrate its applicability and validity, the proposed approach is applied to a PSS development project for solving wildlife damage in a suburban city of Tokyo. The case study was conducted as a participatory workshop, which involved relevant stakeholders to develop a roadmap toward a sustainable future PSS vision based on the proposed method. The result of this application demonstrates that the proposed approach enables the formulation of a long-term PSS design strategy, while comprehensively converging the perspectives and knowledge of each stakeholder participating in the PSS development.