Sustainable Design and Responsible Project Management of Complex Product-Service Systems: An Integrative Literature Review

The long-term success of Product Service Systems (PSS) is highly dependent upon meeting the ongoing sustainability and responsibility requirements such as eco-efficiency, life-cycle extension, societal innovation, and co-value creation. Although these requirements have been studied in the context of PSS previously, PSS has been subject to significant changes which have given rise to emerging concepts such as Complex Product-Service Systems (CoPSS) with a specific focus on complexity as a critical feature. Currently, research on CoPSS is relatively new and there is a great potential to investigate aspects of sustainability and responsibility. These aspects are even more significant when it comes to the process of planning, designing, and control of CoPSS development projects. Therefore, there is a need to explore the links between Sustainable Design (SD) and Responsible Project Management (RPM) in the context of CoPSS development projects. This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework and identify research directions for future theoretical and empirical research in this area through an integrative literature review methodology which evaluates, analyses, and synthesizes the literature from CoPSS, SD and RPM.