# A Comparative Analysis of Sustainable Design Tools for Product Redesign Within a Business Context

## TL;DR

This paper compares sustainable design tools, showing that the biomimicry Life Principles tool is more practical and creative for product redesign in businesses.

## Contribution

The study introduces empirical evidence that the biomimicry Life Principles tool enhances creativity and reduces adoption barriers in corporate R&D.

## Key findings

- The biomimicry Life Principles tool increases creative output in product redesign.
- It requires minimal adoption effort and supports whole-systems thinking.
- R&D practitioners find it intrinsically motivating and practically valuable.

## Abstract

In recent years, corporate perceptions of environmental sustainability have shifted from viewing it as a compliance burden to recognizing it as a strategic driver of innovation and competitive advantage, prompting a demand for effective sustainable design tools. Traditionally, tools like the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tool have been used to evaluate environmental impacts, yet their complexity, cost, and retrospective focus make them impractical for driving early-stage, disruptive innovation. Although biomimicry has emerged as a promising approach, adopting this novel interdisciplinary design practice within a corporate setting requires significant resources and time, disrupting established processes. Therefore, the biomimicry Life Principles (LPs) tool, a guiding sustainable design tool of the practice, provides an opportunity to lower the barrier to the entry of biomimicry within a corporate setting and potentially increases adoption of the broader practice. This comparative study seeks to explore the creative potential, and practical value of the biomimicry LPs tool compared to the traditional LCA approach while exploring the intrinsic motivation of R&D practitioners to implement these tools within a virtual product redesign workshop. To derive our conclusions, we employed a mixed-methods approach comprising a 23-item survey designed to assess practitioners’ intrinsic motivation and perceived practical value of the implemented tool alongside an external evaluation of the creativity of all generated design concepts. Together, these methods provide empirical evidence of the biomimicry LPs tool’s potential to enhance creative output, require minimal adoption effort, and act as a catalyst for whole-systems thinking in sustainable innovation. These findings offer compelling evidence to support their strategic addition to existing R&D toolkits and workflows. By highlighting the efficacy, accessibility, and intrinsic motivation of R&D professionals to use biomimicry LPs, the results underscore the viability of this tool to streamline the integration of biomimicry design thinking into real-world workflows. As such, they represent a pragmatic and scalable pathway to catalyze broader and deeper engagement with biomimicry across corporate contexts.