MIT Sloan Management Review Article on The Environmental Benefits of Digital Design

Digital advances in product design can boost companies’ bottom lines and sustainability practices.

Digital advances in product design are creating new opportunities to boost both environmental sustainability and profit margins. By making product development more design- and information-intensive, companies are creating a new generation of digitally enhanced offerings that are reducing material use, lowering energy demands, and increasing revenues. Managers who understand and embrace this trend are reinterpreting the meaning of asset productivity and benefiting from new links between corporate sustainability and the bottom line.

Any asset can be understood as a function of three basic elements: materials, information, and energy (as we discussed in an earlier essay). Under this approach, sustainable design information not only substitutes for much of the energy and materials needed to deliver product benefits, but it also extends their useful life and optimizes their productivity. Digitization’s not-so-subtle double bottom-line benefit is clear: It can help managers squeeze more economic value out of scarce environmental resources.

About the Author

Gregory C. Unruh, Ph.D., is the Arison Group Endowed Professor of Doing Good Values at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and guest editor for MIT Sloan Management Review’s Sustainability Big Ideas Initiative, and author of the new book The Biosphere Rules: Nature’s Five Circularity Secrets for Sustainable Profits. David Kiron (@davidkiron1) is the executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review.

Learn more about MIT SMR.