Lecturer and researcher at the School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano, where she received her doctoral degree in management engineering. He boasts a series of research experiences abroad, from Boston’s MIT to the Japanese Tokyo Metropolitan University, passing through UTC Sorbonne and Rutgers University in New Jersey that have shaped his academic profile, more and more oriented to what the university world is labeling with the name of life cycle thinking. Among the main research topics of Monica Rossi within this emerging trend, product development and process and product lifecycle management are lean product and process development, PLM (product lifecycle management), data-driven product lifecycle , but also lean startup, design for X (with a special focus on the final phases of the life cycle of products and services and on how to postpone or increase their duration). She is currently involved in a series of national and European projects, including Briefing, which aims to bring to market emerging technologies developed in highly innovative contexts “.
“Technological and organizational implications of Life Cycle Thinking”
If you look around, the products that surround us are nowadays more and more the result of the combination of different minds, different technologies and different materials combined to provide more and more varied and advanced functions that better meet the real needs of customers and users, be they they are explicit or tacit. But in this technological and functional puzzle, the pieces do not always contribute to the game in the same way, and the time variable assumes an increasingly significant weight. The various components that contribute to the system, in fact, not only can have different durations and rates of obsolescence, but they can acquire or lose value during their existence. Here, then, are the main contradictions with which those who design products and services find themselves today and increasingly have to deal: how to develop more durable solutions over time – if the components that make them up together have completely different life cycles – and how to create a system that acquires value over time – if part of it suffers strong downgrading day after day? And in this game of life cycle thinking the challenge is not to lose sight of the impact that decisions taken from the early stages of design, concept and design of products and services have not only on the product / service itself, but also and above all on the ecosystem in which they are going to fall, from the point of view of both functional performance and environmental sustainability. In this context, lean thinking logics allow us to create awareness around complex design for sustainability, recyclability, circularity, reconfiguration dilemmas and support the implementation in practice of principles that are sometimes apparently difficult to reach, such as those of the circular economy. Today’s invitation is therefore to start the debate by exploring what potential exists in terms of reconfigurability and dynamic value creation throughout the product / service life cycle, starting with those objects that impact more than others on our daily lives, and what is more daily than home appliances?
