Abstract Digital product passports (DPPs) will become mandatory in the European Union (EU) for a wide range of product categories under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). DPPs are digital artifacts that capture and share essential product data across organizational boundaries. They have the potential to enhance transparency across value chains and ecosystems, thereby supporting data-driven decision-making throughout the entire product lifecycle and unlocking new opportunities for sustainable value creation. Despite growing momentum, the design, implementation, and management of DPPs are still evolving, resulting in a vast space of design options and ambiguity. This fundamentals paper reports on a multivocal literature review to advance our understanding of this emerging phenomenon from an information systems perspective. We position the DPP against adjacent concepts, define it, develop a conceptual framework, and present a demonstrative scenario that instantiates the conceptual framework’s elements. The findings have implications for DPP research and practice and lay the groundwork for achieving both regulatory compliance and enabling additional sustainable pathways.
Petrik et al. (Fri,) studied this question.