Sustainable Manufacturing and Service Economics 2 (2023) 100010

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Sustainable Manufacturing and Service Economics

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/smse

The relationships between economic orientation, sustainable product

design and innovation performance: Empirical evidence from the US
manufacturing firms
Sandeep Jagani
Department of Management & Quantitative Methods, College of Business, Illinois State University, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: Growing corporate social responsibility requirements have compelled manufacturing organizations to embed
Manufacturing firm sustainability in their business models. Consequently, firms focus on designing and producing products using
Sustainability sustainable means to bring new products to the market that are environmentally sustainable and socially respon-
Economic orientation
sible. However, to satisfy investors, it is also necessary to focus on financial priorities. This research presents a
Sustainable product design
model with relationships between an organization’s economic orientation, sustainable product design activities,
Innovation performance
Structural equation modeling and firm innovation performance to study how financial priorities affect sustainability initiatives in new product
development and innovation outcomes. The empirical evidence is drawn from a panel survey of 282 US manu-
facturing firms. The results suggest strong interrelationships among the three constructs under investigation. The
practitioners can pursue economic orientation and still focus on sustainable product design to achieve innovation
performance.

1. Introduction
In his best-selling novel, The Goal, Dr. Eli Goldratt argues, “The goal
of a manufacturing organization is to make money” ([20], pp. 46). If a
company has a well-articulated strategy to make money, it becomes the
means to guarantee the firm’s long-term survival. Cost, quality, service,
or flexibility are essential for competitiveness, but they do not ensure
long-term survival. Consequently, firms tend to deploy policies that em-
phasize generating cash on a short-term and long-term basis [7,26,42].
Carroll [6] argues that profit motives are the primary incentives for en-
trepreneurship. In the pyramid of corporate social responsibility, eco-
nomic orientation forms the basis upon which all other responsibilities
(legal, ethical, and philanthropic) rest. Therefore, focus on financial as-
pects is the prime necessity for positioning any operational strategy.
On the other hand, various company stakeholders increasingly man-
date it to focus on social and environmental aspects. Manufacturing
companies are becoming more inclined towards developing products
and manufacturing processes that make a minimal detrimental impact
on the environment and society [27,54]. Products can become environ-
mentally sustainable only if sustainability criteria adopting clear eco-
nomic, environmental, and social goals are used right from the initial
stages of product design [40]. When sustainability initiatives are inter-
laced with the new product development process, firms can build envi-
ronmentally sustainable and socially responsible products. Sustainable
product design minimizes manufacturing operations risks and creates
new opportunities that arise from improving products and processes
[30,45]. However, due to economic orientation, creating and execut-
ing strategies related to sustainable product design can be challenging.
Designing and manufacturing environmentally and socially responsible
products do not guarantee favorable financial benefits as these initia-
tives may need significant investment.
2. Literature review
Although ample research is available on sustainability orientation
and its impact on innovation performance, it has primarily focused on
the social and environmental aspects. Still, the economic factor has not
gained much attention. This is because managers may perceive eco-
nomic orientation as conflicting with the radical product and process im-
provements it demands. In this section, we first present major works in
sustainability orientation conducted for innovation performance. Then,
we introduce the scarce literature on economic orientation.
A sustainability orientation enables firms to commit to better sustain-
able practices and invest resources efficiently, resulting in superior inno-
vation performance. Companies that integrate sustainability into their
orientation and innovation processes demonstrate value creation: new
product development and radical innovations [5]. Building on resource-
based, knowledge-based, and capabilities theories, Cheng [10] aims to
identify critical factors that enable the sustainability orientation of di-
versifying green entrants and enhance its effect on green innovation per-

E-mail address: SBJagan@ilstu.edu

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smse.2023.100010
Received 24 April 2022; Received in revised form 6 January 2023; Accepted 22 January 2023
2667-3444/Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
S. Jagani
formance. Claudy et al. [11] confirm from a large-scale survey of 343
international firms that sustainability orientation positively influences
new product development and thus improves innovation performance.
Boakye et al. [4], using data from traded SMEs in the UK, suggest that
a firm’s energy efficiency practices, greenhouse gasses, material, and
resource efficiency have a nonlinear relationship with financial perfor-
mance. There is a compelling need to reconfigure product designs and
advanced manufacturing systems and integrate sustainability in various
stages of new product development and process designs [34–36]. But
management needs to be careful in allocating investments in sustainabil-
ity practices. This demands research considering economic orientation
as a driver of sustainability practices in product design stages.
Although Rosner [51], was the first to argue the importance of eco-
nomic orientation for innovation, there has been very scarce literature
highlighting the importance of economic orientation as a critical driver
for sustainability initiatives in new product development and innova-
tion. Staessens et al. [55] shows that top-performing social enterprises
have a stronger economic orientation. According to the literature, eco-
nomic orientation is a type of strategic management initiative that fos-
ters the notion that corporations’ primary duty is to promote their share-
holders’ financial interests. Pinelli & Maiolini [47] argue that economic
actors are always self-interested and profit-driven [12,46]. An economic
rationale must approve a proper consideration of social and environ-
mental issues.
There are significant differences in adopting sustainability practices
across industries. Theyel & Hofmann [59] argue that larger companies
are more advanced in adopting sustainability practices to outperform
their competitors in product and process innovation. Sustainable prod-
uct design uses sustainability initiatives in during different phases of
product design. Therefore, it can lead a company to better environmen-
tal performance. However, the impact of sustainable product design on
the firm’s innovation performance needs to be tested. As such, the ef-
fect of economic orientation on innovation performance needs to be in-
vestigated. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the role of economic
orientation on the firm’s sustainable product design and innovation per-
formance. The following sections will cover theoretical model devel-
opment, hypothesis development, research methodology, data analysis,
discussion, and conclusion with research implications.
3. Research model and hypotheses development
This article constructs arguments with the help of the firm theory
and the theory of constraints to define the relationship of constructs
under investigation. From the theory of constraints (TOC) perspective,
all management systems are limited in achieving their goals because of
limitations within them. When applying the TOC, managers first identify
the most significant constraint in a system, break it, and look for new
constraints [19,20]. A system with processes like product design, man-
ufacturing, supplier involvement, etc., has sustainability constraints at
every stage. Product design is an organizational activity executed with
a congruent effort of cross-functional teams of design engineers, man-
ufacturing engineers, supply chain managers, IT engineers, accounting
and finance experts, and market experts. Concurrent engineering should
focus on identifying and breaking constraints of the product design area.
Designing the right product first time that brings the firm closer to sus-
tainability goals is critical to the overall sustainability objectives of the
firm.
The theory of the firm aims to address existence, boundaries, in-
ternal relationships, and heterogeneity in the performance of the firms
[31,41,64]. In the pursuit of maximizing profits, firms analyze their in-
puts, production techniques, and pricing structure. Contractual designs
are created to minimize transaction costs between specialized factors of
production [25]. Additionally, firms deploy stringent measures for cost
control mechanisms within various business functions. Further, firms
need to make trade-offs between cost leadership and innovation. The
firm’s existence to maximize shareholder value by increasing revenue,
2
Sustainable Manufacturing and Service Economics 2 (2023) 100010
decreasing operational expenses, and ultimately increasing the net profit
can be viewed as an economic orientation.
Previous research in the field of business strategy has identified sev-
eral orientations like market orientation [29,42], customer orientation
[38], environmental orientation [27] and social orientation [2]. Orien-
tations are the organizational focus that shapes their business policies
to determine desired goals. Economic orientation forms the basis of an
organization’s dominant focus for financial goals [6]. In the pursuit of
long-term sustainability, companies design strategies that lead their or-
ganization to achieve sustained revenue growth, strategic cost advan-
tage, consistent higher return on investment, contingency plans for po-
tential disruptions, senior management accountability for desirable eco-
nomic performance, and communicating their financial priorities to all
employees. We define economic orientation as the extent to which the
firm strategically plans to achieve desirable performance outcomes in
terms of revenue growth, cost management, investment returns, and
contingency planning [7,17].
The need for sustainability compels firms to explore radical ways
to redesign their products in response to market pressures to reduce
the total cycle time, lead time, cost and improve quality. New product
development considers the customer needs but does not include details
about the type and origin of materials that are to be used in the product.
Product design includes activities that help a firm to turn the ideas or the
needs of the customer into specifications by considering the origin and
life cycle of every raw material that goes into the product. Sustainable
product design considers the use of non-hazardous raw materials that
are produced without harmful emissions. Sustainable product design is
defined as the process of designing, developing, and manufacturing of
product by considering the type, origin, and after-life use of the raw
material used to build that product for environmental values as well as
market potential [8,14,18,66].
A sharp focus on achieving performance outcomes may lead the or-
ganization to compromise in making cost-intensive and radical changes
to its products and processes. Based on transaction cost economics [63],
the firm’s goal is to reduce the transactions (within or outside the firm)
and increase profitability. It is cost-effective for a company to switch
to sustainable product design if it prioritizes short-term and long-term
economic goals. Thus, we hypothesize that,
Hypothesis 1. Economic orientation of a firm affects sustainable prod-
uct design.
Due to the dynamic nature of the markets, organizations must pursue
innovations. The ability to innovate is an engine that provides a com-
petitive advantage to organizations. Additionally, a firm’s innovation
performance leads it to other performance measures like environmental
and financial performance. Therefore, we use innovation performance as
a measure of performance outcome to test the effectiveness of economic
orientation and sustainable product design. [32] and [61] measure in-
novation performance as the number of successful patent applications
filed yearly. [58] has a broad definition of innovation performance. They
count it by the improvement in time-to-market, number of new products
introduced to the market, new features added to existing products, cus-
tomer satisfaction, quality improvement, number of patents, and pub-
lications. Thus, redefine innovation performance as an extent to which
the firm has excelled in new product introduction to the market, patent
counts, adding new features to existing products, and time-to-market.
According to the resource-based view of firms, having a valuable,
rare, difficult to imitate, and organized to capture value will provide the
firm with a sustainable competitive advantage [3]. Sustainable product
design ability is one such factor. Firms can leverage sustainable product
design to develop new products that are superior to existing products
in the market in terms of their effect on the environment and society.
Companies can focus on developing new ‘green’ products, which contain
environmentally responsible materials and use less energy to function.
This focus improves innovation performance by continuously launching
new products and environmental performance [23] by reducing emis-
S. Jagani Sustainable Manufacturing and Service Economics 2 (2023) 100010

Fig. 1. Research Model.

Table 1
Profile of respondents.

Industry by SIC n (%) Size: # of employees n (%)

34 Fabricated metal 70 24.8 Up to 100 74 26.2

35 Industrial and commercial machinery/computer 47 16.7 101 to 499 70 24.8
36 Electronic/other electrical equipment 38 13.5 500 to 999 45 16.0
24 Food and kindred products 33 11.7 1,000 to 4,999 40 14.2
28 Chemicals and allied products 26 9.2 More than 5000 53 18.8
29 Petroleum refining and related products 37 13.1
50 Automotive 11 3.9
34 Others 20 7.1
282 100% 282 100%

n = sample size.
SIC = Standard Industrial Classification.

sions and environmental regulation violations. A firm can grow and ex-
cel in the competition by creating breakthroughs that can make a blue
ocean for itself. Thus, we hypothesize that,
Hypothesis 2. Sustainable product design is positively related to inno-
vation performance.
Next, we test the direct relationship between economic orientation
and innovation performance. Economically oriented companies are con-
cerned about their long-term business sustainability. Previous studies
have shown that economically oriental firms are customers centric by
providing superior value that values innovation objectives [24,57]. Re-
gardless of implementing sustainable product design, these companies
work on other ideas to provide innovation. Thus, we hypothesized that,
Hypothesis 3. Economic orientation of a firm affects its innovation per-
formance.
Fig. 1 represents a research model that denotes the relationship be-
tween economic orientation, sustainable product design, and innovation
performance.
tionnaire using two rounds of Q-sorts. The two participants of Q-sorts
consisted of a senior academician and a top-level executive from a large
automotive company. We made the necessary changes to the items based
on the recommendations of the Q-sorts participants. The final set of
items was loaded on the Qualtrics web platform for the large-scale sur-
vey.
Qualtrics sent the questionnaire to 1100 professionals in the manu-
facturing industry within the United States. We received 360 completed
responses making a response rate of 32.7%. We identified several dis-
engaged respondents based on the extremely low completion time and
eliminated those responses from the study. We also checked for the out-
liers and eliminated the complete observation if any of the measures
were outliers. We could retain a sample size of n = 282 observations
for the final analysis. Table 1 shows all the responded profiles of the re-
tained observations. The survey’s non-response bias was tested by com-
paring early and late respondents. There was no evidence of significant
non-response bias.
4.2. Common method bias

4. Research methodology
4.1. The sample
To investigate the relationships between the constructs, we use pri-
mary data collected from the survey of a panel of practitioners provided
by Qualtrics from the manufacturing sector of the United States. The
panel members comprised senior managers (managers with more than
ten years of experience in their current organization), vice presidents, C-
level employees, and directors. The sample represented companies from
various industries leading the manufacturing sector. The sample com-
prised multiple industries, as presented in Table 1. These industries were
selected since they significantly to GDP growth in the manufacturing
sector from 2010 to 2016 [56].
We collected the data in July and August 2017 using the Qualtrics
web platform. Before launching a large-scale survey, we tested the ques-
The common method bias (CMB) occurs when the instrument causes
variations in responses. This study addressed the common method bias
issue from the questionnaire development stage. The questionnaire was
designed in a way that survey questions were clear and concise. Inde-
pendent variables (economic orientation and sustainable product de-
sign) and dependent variables (innovation performance) were in sep-
arate sections of the questionnaire [13,50,62,65]. This process should
have addressed most of the common method bias issues. However, we
use two statistical measures to further check for the common method
bias: [22] single-factor test and the Common Latent factor test.
Using Herman’s single factor test, we run exploratory factor analysis
in SPSS, constraining the number of factors to ‘1′. The total variance pro-
duced by the single factor is 35.27%. Hence, we can conclude that the
data collected does not show any common method bias since the total
variance explained by Harman’s single factor is less than 50% [48]. The
common latent factor test for detecting common method bias was done

3
S. Jagani Sustainable Manufacturing and Service Economics 2 (2023) 100010

Table 2
Description of the constructs and references for measures.

Construct Description Reference

Economic Orientation
Sustainable Product Design
Innovation Performance
The extent to which the firm strategically plans to achieve desirable performance outcomes [7,17]
in terms of revenue growth, cost management, investment returns, and contingency planning.
The process of designing and developing a product by considering the raw material’s type, [8,14,18,66]
origin, and after-life use for environmental values and market potential.
The extent to which the firm has excelled in new product introduction to the market, patent [32,58,61]
counts, adding new features to existing products, and time-to-market.

Table 3
Summary of measurement scales.

Constructs and Items Loadings Cronbach’s Alpha

Economic Orientation (EO):

This is about the last three years of your company strategy in relation to economic orientation
(1=Strongly Disagree, 7=Strongly Agree).
EO1 Our firm has strategic plans of concerted efforts for achieving sustained revenue growth 0.835 0.875
EO2 Our firm takes long-term measures for strategic cost advantage 0.831
EO3 Our firm adopts clear guidelines on consistent rate of return on investment on major 0.796
initiatives
EO4 Our firm formulates various contingency plans for potential disruptive failures 0.725
EO5 Our firm holds senior management accountable for desirable economic performance 0.620
EO6 Our firm communicates financial priorities to all employees 0.624
Sustainable Product Design (SPD)
We implement sustainability practices through sustainable product design so that: (1=Strongly
Disagree, 7=Strongly Agree).
SPD1 The final product uses recycled materials 0.690 0.896
SPD2 The final product uses minimum raw-material to produce 0.737
SPD3 The final product uses minimum energy once in use 0.772
SPD4 The final product is reusable 0.723
SPD5 The final product is recyclable 0.726
SPD6 The production process has competitive record on energy consumption 0.773
SPD7 The production process has competitive record on water consumption 0.734
Innovation Performance (IP)
This is about current innovation performance outcomes.
(1=Strongly Disagree, 7=Strongly Agree).
IP1 Our firm shows increase in new product introductions to market 0.867 0.909
IP2 Our firm reports the excellent results of process innovation 0.828
IP3 Our firm shows increase in new features for existing products 0.866
IP4 Our firm shows reduction in time-to-market 0.682
IP5 Our firm shows increase in number of new products development in pipeline 0.849

in AMOS by introducing a common latent factor. We connected the com- Table 4

mon latent factor to every observed item and ran an analysis to find the Correlation Metrics and Model Validity Measures.
unconstrained model’s initial 𝜒 2 and degrees of freedom (𝜒 2 = 176.363, CR AVE EO SPD IP
DF=108). Next, we constrained the path coefficient of each regression a
EO 0.880 0.554 0.744
line to be 0 and reran the analysis. The result provides 𝜒 2 and degrees
SPD 0.893 0.543 0.704∗ ∗ ∗ 0.737
of freedom of the constrained model (𝜒 2 = 199.506 and DF=125). Fi- IP 0.911 0.675 0.725∗ ∗ ∗ 0.639∗ ∗ ∗ 0.821
nally, we compare both models’ 𝜒 2 and degrees of freedom and check if
the difference is significant. The chi-square test for the zero-constrained Significance of Correlations: p < 0.050,
∗ ∗∗
p < 0.010, ∗ ∗ ∗
p < 0.001.
model was insignificant (𝜒 2 =33.143, DF=17 p-value = 0.145), indicat-
a = square root of AVE.
ing the absence of common method bias [16].

4.3. Measures
We conducted an extensive literature review and interviews with
practitioners and experts to develop the measures for the three con-
structs. The basis for the measures of economic orientation and sus-
tainable product design was from the six interviews with the experts.
In contrast, the measures of innovation performance are adopted from
prior literature. Table 2 describes constructs and the literature basis to
develop the measurement items. Table 3 lists measurement items for
each of the constructs.
5. Data analysis
We analyzed the factors based on Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)
in SPSS® [21]. Then, we utilized Structural Equation Modeling (SEM)
using IBM® SPSS® AMOS version 25.0 for data analysis for this study.
SEM uses a two-stage approach: measurement models are confirmatory
factor analysis (CFA) and structural model or path analysis [15]. We
chose SEM because it can create latent construct scores based on cross-
products using multi-item measures and handle multiple constructs to
control multicollinearity issues among endogenous constructs.
6. Results
6.1. Testing the measurement model
We evaluate the relationship between the measures and the construct
in testing the measurement model. The reliability and validity of the
scales are assessed at this stage [1]. As noted in Table 3, Cronbach’s
Alpha for each of the three constructs is more than 0.7. The AVE for
each of the three constructs is greater than 0.5, and composite reliabil-
ity (CR) is greater than 0.7, as shown in Table 4 [43,44]. This indicates

4
S. Jagani
adequate reliability. The convergent validity is determined by assessing
the factor loadings of each item. As reported in Table 3, the average
factor loading of each construct is above 0.7, indicating adequate con-
vergent validity [39]. The discriminant validity (the extent to which a
construct shares variance with this item) was assessed by comparing the
square roots of the average variance extracted (AVE) to the correlation
between constructs. The diagonal elements (square roots of AVEs) are
higher than off-diagonal elements, as reported in Table 4, generated by
the AMOS plugin Gaskin & Lim [16] developed. This indicates adequate
discriminant validity.
We assessed the model fit of the measurement model using model
fit indices as suggested by [28]. The model fit measures (𝜒 2 /df=1.959,
CFI=0.963, SRMR=0.048, RMSEA=0.058, PClose=0.099) were well over
the threshold, suggesting adequate model fit.
6.2. Testing the structural model
In testing the structural model, we assessed the direction, strength,
and significance level of the SEM-estimated path coefficient. Fig. 2
shows the path cost efficiency of each of the hypothesized relationships.
All but one hypothesis were supported. The structural model received
an acceptable level of empirical support for the model fit of the hypothe-
sized model [28]. The structural model’s model fit indices (𝜒 2 /df=1.959,
CFI=0.963, SRMR=0.048, RMSEA=0.058, PClose=0.099) also suggest
adequate model fit.
Hypothesis 1 predicts that the economic orientation of a firm affects
sustainable product design. Fig. 2 reports that this relationship is posi-
tive and statistically significant (𝛽 = 0.704, t = 8.468, p > 0.001). This
suggests that companies with strong economic orientation should fore-
see benefits in deploying the sustainability initiatives like sustainable
product design to obtain performance benefits. Other strategic orienta-
tions like market orientation, customer orientation, environmental ori-
entation, and social orientation propagate the need for environmentally
and socially sustainable products. This implies that companies can con-
tinue focusing on achieving sustained revenue growth, strategic cost ad-
vantage, consistent rate of return on investment, management account-
ability for performance, and communicating financial priorities by eco-
nomic orientation. The results suggest that these firms should conduct
product design and manufacturing practices using recycled materials,
minimal raw materials, and frugal use of resources for higher innova-
tion performance.
Hypothesis 2 predicts that sustainable product design is positively
related to innovation performance. Fig. 2 shows that sustainable prod-
uct design has a strong and statistically significant effect on innovation
performance (𝛽 = 0.257, t = 3.360, p > 0.001). Thus, Hypothesis 2 was
supported.
5
Sustainable Manufacturing and Service Economics 2 (2023) 100010
Fig. 2. Results of Structural Model Analysis.
Significance of Path Coefficients:
∗
p < 0.050, ∗ ∗ p < 0.010, ∗ ∗ ∗ p < 0.001.
Hypothesis 3 predicts that the economic orientation of a firm affects
innovation performance. Consistent with the previous research, the re-
sults in Figure 4 indicate that Hypothesis 3 was supported (𝛽=0.544,
t = 6.213, p > 0.001).
Additionally, an ad-hoc analysis was conducted to test the media-
tion effect of sustainable product design. The results of the mediation
analysis are presented in Table 5.
From the above table, it can be noted that the specific indirect effect
is 0.181 (p = 0.013). Therefore, sustainable product design is a strong
mediator contributing significantly to the total effect.
7. Discussion
All three hypotheses were strongly supported. The support for Hy-
pothesis 1 reestablishes the role of economic orientation concerning
sustainable product design activities. Top-performing firms are more
economically oriented [55]. Sustainable product design calls for trans-
formative changes to products and manufacturing processes [49,67].
Therefore, many firms may see sustainability initiatives in product de-
sign as cost centers with very little payback or cannibalizing the current
customer base. This research has provided insights into how companies
with high economic orientations can focus on sustainable product design
practices for better performance outcomes.
Support for Hypothesis 2 reconfirms the role of sustainable prod-
uct design for innovation performance outcomes. Previous research has
explored the importance of sustainability initiatives in product design
phases to improve innovation performance [59]. The sustainability ini-
tiatives in product design can introduce a radical product that may trans-
form customers’ lives [37]. Additionally, the product design process im-
provement removes non-value-added steps to incorporate cost-efficient
and environmentally and socially sustainable practices that enhance the
product and the lives of the people producing these products.
The results also indicate that sustainable product design strongly
mediates the relationship between economic orientation and innova-
tion performance. Firms with strategic plans of concerted efforts for
sustained revenue growth, long-term measures for strategic cost ad-
vantage, guidelines on consistent rate of return on investment on sig-
nificant initiatives, and contingency plans for potential disruptive fail-
ures are forward-looking (Sáez-Martínez et al. 2016). Over time they
develop an organizational culture, value systems, resources, and capa-
bilities that equip them to analyze and invest in being effective (doing
the right things) over efficiency [9,60]. Sustainable product design not
only improves the cost of the product by being steward but also cares
for the environment and society to ensure the availability of raw mate-
rials perpetually, which all stakeholders of the firm value. Sustainable
product design aid in the transformation of product to reduce negative
environmental impacts and industrial waste [52]. By introducing new
S. Jagani Sustainable Manufacturing and Service Economics 2 (2023) 100010

Table 5
Standardized Total, Total Indirect, Specific Indirect, and Direct Effects.

Two-Tailed
Effects Estimate SE. Est./SE. P-Value CI (95%)

Total 0.725 0.042 17.262 0.000 (0.654, 0.816)

Total indirect 0.181 0.074 2.446 0.013 (0.049, 0.343)
Specific indirect effect 0.181 0.074 2.446 0.013 (0.049, 0.343)
Economic Orientation
Sustainable product design
Innovation Performance
Direct 0.544 0.091 5.978 0.000 (0.371, 0.727)
Economic Orientation
Innovation Performance

environment-friendly products to the market, adding sustainable fea- avoid cost leadership strategy and target innovation strategy when sus-
tures for existing products, reducing time-to-market, and having more tainability is a concern.
sustainable products in the pipeline, firms provide transformative prod-
uct innovation that enhances the lives of customers, employees, and 9. Conclusion
society at large.
Although sustainable product design can be viewed as a basic con-
cept of operations management, this research provides a unique per-
spective on new product development areas. The economic orientation
8. Limitations and implications
of a firm is the basis for the organization’s survival. The role of the orga-
nization’s economic orientation on sustainable product design is central
This research provides findings from a survey-based study that uses
to the firm’s performance.
responses from a single person from manufacturing companies. There-
This study defines the need for sustainable product design. Conduct-
fore there are some limitations of this study, and the results must be
ing a literature review across the new product development, strategic
interpreted cautiously. Although there were screening questions in the
orientation, and sustainability fields presents a comprehensive research
questionnaire, some respondents may not be fully aware of all the prac-
model with critical constructs related to sustainable product design. Re-
tices in both functional areas: the product design team and the strate-
search methods involve three stages. Based on the literature review, in-
gic formulation team that devises strategies for economic orientation.
terviews, and empirical validation, this research finds the importance of
Future studies may use multiple respondents from different functional
economic orientation for sustainability practices and innovation perfor-
areas to collect information about economic orientation and sustainable
mance.
product design. The data collected for this study was from the pre-Covid
This research offers several takeaways for academicians and man-
era. Due to the Covid period disruptions, many companies have changed
agers. Its applicability is in three different areas: strategy formulation,
their economic priorities and specific business processes. Further stud-
execution, and measurement of performance outcomes. First, this re-
ies in the post-Covid period can analyze how economic orientation and
search emphasizes economic orientation, which is the building block
sustainable product design practices in manufacturing organizations are
for any organization to formulate a strategy based on three dimensions
impacted by financial and human resource disruptions caused during
of sustainability. Second, it offers effective mechanisms for sustainable
this period.
product design as a company innovation tool. Finally, it provides an in-
This study provides three significant theoretical implications. First,
strument to quantify a strategic approach, sustainability practices, and
this study develops a benchmark instrument that measures economic
their performance outcome.
orientation and sustainable product design. The literature has paid lim-
ited attention to the economic orientation when studying the impact of
Declaration of Competing Interest
sustainability orientation, although sustainability must encompass eco-
nomic, environmental, and social dimensions. Second, this study envi-
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
sions sustainable product design through the lens of the theory of con-
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
straints and continuous improvement. Breaking the constraints of work-
the work reported in this paper.
ing with stricter environmental and societal goals will improve innova-
tion performance. Third, despite economic orientation focusing on rev- Data Availability
enue growth, cost management, investment returns, and contingency
planning, it has a strong relationship with sustainable product design Data will be made available on request.
practices.
Likewise, this study also provides three crucial managerial implica- References
tions. First, companies can focus on the economic orientation, which is
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Sandeep Jagani is an Assistant Professor of Management and Quantitative Methods at the
Illinois State University. He earned a Ph.D. degree in Manufacturing and Technology Man-
agement from the University of Toledo. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Chemical
Engineering and MBA in Finance, Marketing, and International Business. He is a Certified
Six-Sigma Green Belt by the American Society for Quality (ASQ). He has worked for over
six years in manufacturing operations. His-research interests include operations sustain-
ability, green business, and technology management. His-articles have been published in
the Journal of Production Economics, the Journal of Cleaner Production, and the Journal of
Business and Industrial Marketing.