Integrating Sustainability into Early-Stage Concept Evaluation: Industrial Insights and Requirements for Decision Support

Sustainability is increasingly influencing product development, yet its integration into early-stage concept evaluation remains challenging due to uncertainty and competing technical, economic and manufacturing priorities. This paper investigates how sustainability can be incorporated into concept evaluation through an exploratory case study of a sustainability-enhanced Concept Selection Matrix (CSM) in the aerospace industry. Drawing on interviews, workshops, company documentation and engaged scholarship collaboration, the study examines the development and intended use of a revised matrix. The findings show that sustainability can be integrated into existing concept-selection practices through explicit sustainability criteria, dedicated weighting, a separate Sustainability Score, guidance and documented rationale. The revised CSM supports trade-off reasoning by making priorities, assumptions and sustainability implications visible while preserving engineering judgement. The study proposes nine requirements for sustainability-oriented concept-selection support and suggests that the CSM can function as a boundary object that facilitates communication and knowledge integration across design, manufacturing, procurement, quality, project management and sustainability domains.