New framework for early-stage sustainability assessment of innovation projects published
A new open peer-review publication from Britest details a novel framework for early-stage sustainability assessment of innovation projects and an enabling multi-criteria decision analysis methodology handling uncertainty in the evaluation of the options considered.
Britest's latest contribution to the scientific literature introduces a new two-level hierarchical framework for early-stage sustainability assessment amongst a set of alternatives applicable from the earliest stages of process or product development. The use of the new framework in combination with an improved weighted-sum method for multi-criteria decision analysis in the presence of uncertainty is illustrated through application to a case study based upon a real-world decision scenario from speciality polymer manufacture.
The work described in the paper, which was made possible by Britest's participation in the EU Horizon Europe collaborative project ETERNAL, was motivated by the desire to increase the accessibility of a decision-making methodology and tool which is easily used by non-specialist users within the context of facilitated group activities including Britest process understanding studies. In particular, the new approaches strengthen Britest's capability to support early-stage thinking about the sustainability dimension of innovation projects.
"In simple terms, the FESSA model helps project teams and managers of innovation portfolios think in the round and more strategically about their product and process innovations," explains joint author and Britest Technical Services Director, Rob Peeling. "By prompting conversation and knowledge sharing along the lines of five primary criteria and drilling into how well the innovation addresses a range of sub-criteria within each of these strands, we can help project teams build up a surprsingly rich overall picture of the strengths and weaknesses of the various options they may be considering.
The FESSA model helps project teams and managers of innovation portfolios think in the round and more strategically about their product and process innovations,
The top level structure of the FESSA model - the five criteria mentioned by Rob Peeling - considers Technical Feasibility, clarity of Business Model, lowest possible Environmental Impact, feasibility of the Supply Chain around the core manufacturing process, and Social Impact (the people factor).
"These may sound in some ways self-evident," adds lead author John Henderson, Technical Manager at Britest, "but in our experience even multidisciplinary teams struggle to pull their thoughts and evidence together in a coherent and actionable way across this range of topics, especially in the early stages of projects when even the answers to pretty basic questions like, 'Does it work?' can be cloaked in a fog of uncertainty."
The new MARE algorithm at the heart of the software enabling the application of the FESSA framework embraces uncertainty, allowing decision makers to indicate not just how they rate outcomes relative to one another, but how uncertain they are about their evaluations. The input data across all relevant criteria of the FESSA framework are combined into a final outcome score probablity distribution for each alternative. This essentially indicates the prospects of success across all the sustainability dimensions for the alternatives, taking account of how important the various facets are in the decision process by weighting.
Summary plot of FESSA/CURE analysis of the choice between seven technology options for a product innovation in speciality polymers showing the contributions of each of the main criteria to the overall decision score and the estimated uncertainty in the outcome.
The ETERNAL project is contributing to sustainable development of pharmaceutical manufacture, use and disposal, by using and promoting full life cycle approaches covering design, manufacture, use, and disposal. In the project, the FESSA framework has already been successfully applied to one of the project's industrial case studies scaling up a green chemistry approach based on improved manufacture of lipsome nanoparticle based formulations, and further use is planned as part of Britest's role steering the case studies through a pathway towards scale-up for commercial readiness.
Using FESSA and CURE, decisions makers can make timely, rational, and holistic decisions in a documented and defensible way, a key requirement to effective management of a sustainable research and innovation portfolio. If you are facing a difficult decision, contact John or Rob to see how Britest's facilitated decision making service can help. It might be the best decision you make this year!