Industry is a main stakeholder when it comes to realising the transition towards a sustainable future. Academia, with its, knowledge and methods, needs to support the industry on this journey. This paper, focuses on the practical learnings on how to implement sustainability research from an industrial perspective. It aims to share some lessons learnt from a longitudinal case study and a development journey in implementing sustainability research in the product innovation process at GKN Aerospace Engine System. The paper gives an overview, based on a literature study, of what is required to successfully implement sustainability in product development. It also provides a summary of the different research projects at the company with learnings from practical and academic perspectives, and the main learnings and changes in relation to different development phases in the sustainability journey. Although, this journey began over ten years ago, and shows the importance of long-term collaboration, it provides key-factors that can be applied also in short term collaborations and for faster implementation of research in general and sustainable product development research in particular.

Cultivation tools have a long history of use. The integration of cultivation within current organic and conventional weed management programs is conditional on the availability of functional, practical cultivation tools. However, there are performance and operational limitations with current cultivation tools. Serviceable improvement in weed control is the impetus behind creation of new tool designs. The primary objective of this research was to design and construct two cultivators that might address the limitations of current cultivation tools. A secondary objective was to identify historical influences on the technology, availability, and capability of cultivation tools. Two new tractor-mounted cultivators were designed and constructed as loose extractions of antique handheld tools. The first tool, a block cultivator, has a flat surface in the front of the tool that rests against the soil and limits the entrance of a rear-mounted blade. The second tool resembles a stirrup hoe, where a horizontal steel blade with a beveled front edge slices through the upper layer of the soil. Block and stirrup cultivator units were mounted on a toolbar with a traditional S-tine sweep, so that the novel cultivators could be compared directly with a common standard. Relative to the S-tine sweep, the stirrup cultivator reduced weed survival by about one-third and the block cultivator reduced weed survival by greater than two-thirds. Of the three tools, block cultivator performance was least influenced by environmental and operational variances.