Lean Product Development for a Circular Economy: An Operations Management Perspective

For years, manufacturing companies have been working with developing and implementing lean thinking to continuously improve the management of their operations. Since lean thinking provides tools and approaches to solve problems enterprise-wide, there is an ambition among lean companies to use the lessons learned while applying lean, to develop and implement a more circular economy approach to their operations. However, extant research combining lean and circular economy concern mostly the business model level and there is a lack of research on how to bring circular economy thinking to the operations. Even though both lean thinking and circular economy emphasize the importance of designing products that can be manufactured in an efficient way, using as few resources as possible, and without waste, the extant literature combining these concepts refers mainly to the processes concerning the product’s end of life. This paper deploys the ‘by design’ aspect of circularity through the lens of lean product development, a key element within the lean thinking concept.