Strategic resources are the assets, capabilities, organizational processes, information, and knowledge that enable a company to conceive of and implement strategies that improve its efficiency and effectiveness in ways that are difficult for competitors to mimic. Strategic resources for environmental strategy include capacities for identifying opportunities for environmental improvements, analyzing and engaging stakeholders, managing channels for capturing value from stakeholders, and ensuring credibility with stakeholders. Transaction costs internal to companies can also inhibit companies from developing and implementing an environmental strategy. Companies may not adopt value-enhancing innovations because managers lack sufficient information and incentives to implement them. Company culture and structures that enhance the flow of information across functional units and incentivize innovation can increase the effectiveness of value-enhancing environmental improvements. Effective chief sustainability officers enhance communication across functional units. Understanding strategic resources’ role in developing and implementing environmental strategy helps identify when a company is ill-suited for what otherwise appears to be a promising environmental opportunity.

A green product is differentiated from similar products through an augmented sustainability feature, such as being produced with less environmental harm of having a smaller environmental impact upon disposal. The case of Stonyfield organic yogurt and the company’s founders, Samuel Kaymen and Gary Hirshberg, illustrate the challenges of selling green products. Green products need to offer co-benefits to garner consumer demands. A co-benefit is a functional, emotional, or social value that a recipient receives along with the product’s environmental benefits. Stonyfield’s organic yogurt offered consumers health and warm-glow emotional co-benefits stemming from the lower pesticides used in its production. Certifications and brands can play important roles in assuring customers that a green product’s promised benefits are genuine. Stonyfield used organic certification and its own quirky brand to solve these credibility challenges.

New product development processes need to be compliant to regulatory requirements, and this chapter highlights the salient processes and quality systems to put into place to achieve success. Project management is made simple with specific tools provided here. Customer feedback is channeled into specific product characteristics, and the right tools are shown in this chapter. The biopharma industry has statistics showing less than 10% of starting compounds succeed in reaching market approval, and this chapter explains what causes these failures. The key issues that have repeatedly caused failure during device and diagnostic product development are also pointed out. Ethical decisions have to be made during product development as shown in this chapter. Outsourcing is a real option due to the availability of many contract research and manufacturing organizations, and judicious use of this option is discussed in this chapter. Key milestones that reduce risk and show transition from early stage to preclinical prototype stages are reviewed here. Does the popular concept of minimum viable product in software development apply in biomedicine prototyping? Other similar questions that help the reader understand pitfalls and best practices are answered here.

Standards set by bodies such as the International Organization for Standards (ISO) have long been perceived as narrow technical specifications for organising production, protecting consumers and facilitating international trade in domains such as measurements, performance and related effects of manufactured goods. Today, their scope has been extended to non-physical fields such as labour, environment, education, risk and security, or management systems and business models. While the ISO might not be the best known organisation of global governance, it fiercely competes with other bodies in a jungle of labels, certifications, and benchmarks. This chapter introduces how the book focuses on the role of standards in the global expansion of services as a new form of power in contemporary global political economy. It reviews the contribution to the existing literature in five interrelated debates, often at the crossroads of several disciplinary fields. It presents the methodology and briefly outlines the subsequent chapters.