Sustainability in the Dutch high-tech industry

In 2023, TNO-ESI embarked on year-long research with its industrial and academic partners into sustainable development within the Dutch high-tech industry, particularly product development. The resulting report, ‘Sustainability Assessment of the Dutch High-Tech Industry 2023’, lays the groundwork for integrating sustainability into the system architecting domain, translating broad sustainability goals into actionable insights. Despite challenges in organisational alignment, TNO-ESI’s extensive system architecting expertise allows it to provide the leadership, direction and methods needed to take the next steps.

Sustainability embodies responsible management and care of the planet’s resources and the well-being of current and future generations – needs that are increasingly prioritised through international efforts like the European Green Deal. At the same time, corporate sustainability has gone mainstream, making sustainability a holistic and interconnected concept. In its assessment, TNO-ESI therefore adopted a multidimensional approach including literature surveys, online interviews and workshops. This aimed to identify relevant tools, regulations and standards for sustainable product development, assess the current embedding of sustainability into product development, and pinpoint topics where TNO-ESI can provide leadership.

As an integrating organisation, TNO-ESI collated information from a diverse ecosystem of industrial and academic partners, as well as other TNO units and teams with significant sustainability expertise. Given their focus on electric products with long lifecycles, the industrial partners face a challenge in bridging the gap between long-term circularity and short-term energy efficiency. Nevertheless, TNO-ESI partners agree that the integration of sustainability into the design process of high-tech systems is one of their top priorities, as well as for Dutch industry in general. In short, partners expect to include sustainability-related principles in their product definitions rather than addressing them later in the development cycle.

In spite of ample resources, including references frameworks like the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and practical tools such as lifecycle assessments (LCAs), TNO-ESI found a significant gap between overarching sustainability strategies and their implementation at product levels. This is typically because most partners began as independent enterprises but became integrated into larger corporations that are organised along four layers: the corporate, division, business and product levels. Sustainability goals are primarily set at the corporate level. Multiple levels of downward translation and upward reporting are needed to establish and follow up on objectives at the product level, where most TNO-ESI industrial partners operate. This creates enormous complexities in inter-organisational understanding and budgeting.

Given the need for company-wide goals, almost every partner emphasised the significance of system architecting as a TNO-ESI focus area. This is an approach that explores how novel considerations, such as sustainability, can be integrated into product design spaces to understand how needs can be met within the existing business and with common business models. Such a transition to ‘Sustainability by Design’ requires system architects to have a deep awareness of the evolving context, as well as the leadership skills needed to guide the way to tailormade solutions that respect the differences across organisations, markets and products. Drawing in part from the findings of the sustainability assessment, TNO-ESI therefore aims to continue building up expertise on sustainability in complex system design and industrial environments with the ultimate vision of firmly embedding sustainability aspects in the reasoning toolbox of system architects.