The Societal Embedding of Sustainable Product-Service Systems: Towards an Instrumental Approach to Support Strategic Designers

Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability, but their implementation and diffusion is hindered by several cultural, corporate and regulative barriers. Thus they often cope with a dominant socio-technical regime (and its established and stable rules and institutions). Within this framework the paper illustrates the current status of a PhD research aimed at: (I) understanding how the process of introduction and diffusion of sustainable PSS takes place and how it can be managed and oriented; (II) investigating the potential contribution that a strategic design approach can have in stimulating and supporting the societal embedding of this kind of innovations. The paper is structured as follows: after the introduction, the research questions and the research hypothesis are illustrated; the research methodology is outlined in section four and the intermediate results are described in section five; the paper concludes by indicating the next steps to be undertaken.