Product Innovation Process
ASSA ABLOY’s product Innovation process is based on Lean principles. The process consists of several modules, including:
Product management - a long-term perspective
The market rewards a proactive approach to sustainability. This requires an understanding of how sustainability issues will affect our industry in the future, how sustainability regulation is expected to evolve, and more. Product management includes devising generation plans for new products and entirely new technologies.
ASSA ABLOY’s long-term planning is influenced by a reduce-reuse-recycle principle. The aim is to develop products that are as upgradable and exchangeable as possible.
Voice of the customer - meeting market needs
Understanding and meeting customer and market needs is a vital part of ASSA ABLOY’s innovation process. This involves collecting and analyzing long-term customer and user needs and trends; and understanding how they are affected by, and their preferences relate to sustainability – such as energy requirements on buildings, sustainability as a competitive advantage for space rental, and more.
Efficient delivery of innovation projects - the environmental checklist
ASSA ABLOY wants to ensure that all sustainability aspects are taken into consideration in the development of the product and the manufacturing process.
- Concepts are carefully evaluated against both customer needs and sustainability requirements before moving into the engineering design phase
- Encouraging a “front-loading” approach to problem-solving. In other words, identify potential problems as early in the project as possible
- Applying the reduce, reuse, recycle principles as guidelines in all innovation
- All projects are required to apply the environmental checklist before they are given the go-ahead to proceed beyond the process and design stage
- Trialing the use of tools supporting sustainable engineering and design
Environmental Product Declaration
More and more architects and designers want objective data to help inform decisions on choices of building materials, elements and assemblies.
An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) offers a reliable and standardised way to convey the results of a lifecycle assessment (LCA), allowing comparisons between products serving the same purpose. It is essentially a product-specific environmental score card, a form of ecolabel. Classified as a type 3 ecolabel, it’s a robust way of summarising the environmental impacts associated with a product over its entire lifecycle.
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