Cost management and sustainability in new product development: a research note

This paper explores the role played by cost management in new product development activities when a firm pursues a sustainability strategy. The study aims to contribute to the growing knowledge on this topic and to verify, through a case study, previous research findings (Giannetti and Marelli, 2016), which showed that firms more oriented to sustainability use more cost management tools in new product development. Therefore, this paper aims to describe the reasons that push firms oriented to sustainability toward a systematic use of cost management in new product development. The case study belongs to the automotive industry, where regulations about environmental issues and stakeholder pressures force the companies to take care of their activities according to the environmental, social and economic dimensions. Main findings show that within this company cost information is systematically used to coordinate and to manage the achievement of different goals within the organization, shaping all organizational activities towards pursuing jointly the environmental, social and economic sustainability. Furthermore, empirical evidences highlight the relevance of competition and technology sector features in constraining or fostering the use of cost management when the firm pursues a strategy oriented to sustainability.