Sustainability as a driver for innovation

The Department of Manufacturing Engineering is hosting a lecture by Professor Tim McAloone of the Technical University of Denmark on Wednesday, November 23, at 5 p.m. at the Faculty of Engineering on Sustainability as a Driver for Innovation.

Sustainable development is a term that has existed for some years now and in its definition describes the need for society in general and industry in particular to consider positively people, planet and profit together, to achieve a balanced economy and ecology.

However, it is not apparent that the demands for sustainable development have successfully been understood or implemented in industry, despite the increasing calls for sustainability considerations to be made, either through consumer and general societal demands (e.g. legislation, standards, purchasing power, lobbying), or through pressure from the growing number of sustainability indexes on the open stock exchange.

The public lecture will both demonstrate the successful examples of ecodesign development and integration, and investigate the shortcomings when integration in industry fails.

Professor McAloone is Associate Professor of Product Development at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). In this position he works closely with Danish industry, finding new methods and models for a wide range of product development issues, such as environmental issues, mechatronics, product innovation and the process of product development itself.

He teaches undergraduates at DTU, particularly within the university's new Masters education programme, design and innovation. He received his Ph.D. from Cranfield University in 1998, where he studied the integration of eco-design strategies into industry.

Before this Professor McAloone worked as an environmental procurement consultant for British Telecom, where he carried out an investigation into current and future possibilities for electronic office equipment recycling and procurement.