Life cycle engineering and management - fostering the management-orientation of life cycle engineering activities

Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) is a promising approach for directing engineering activities towards sustainability. Although LCE includes not only technical and ecological but also economic target figures, management-orientation is rather limited and issues affecting the success of innovation processes are neglected. This is shown based on a literature review. For contributing towards closing this gap, this paper presents suggestions to foster the market-, customer-, and supply chain-orientation of LCE: its extension by business modeling and integration with Target Costing. Elements of these approaches are illustrated by the research activities of the Cluster of Excellence MERGE.