Safer By Design : A way forward for management ?

In Los Angeles, California, municipal authorities in 2015 dumped nearly 100 million black plastic balls, each about ten centimetres in diameter, onto the surface of water reservoirs to limit evaporation and pollution.

An innovation that may have seemed interesting, but turned out to be disastrous . Indeed, among other criticisms, the manufacture of the plastic balls required far more water than they were able to conserve.

This unusual example helps us to understand the challenges of safer by design (SBD).

The theory of safer by design is still in its infancy, and the notion, like the names that refer to it, is neither stabilized nor clearly defined. To attempt a definition, a good starting point is to consider safer by design as an approach aimed at improving the risk/benefit ratio of an innovation throughout its entire life cycle.

As detailed in this article, this approach has been structured since the early 20th century around three independent fields of application. Today, it meets strong societal demands, but also generates tensions due to its significant managerial implications.

In practical terms, everyone's life is directly impacted by the safety and environmental aspects of consumer products, and it's interesting to understand how the design of these products is evolving.

From a theoretical point of view, deciphering the potential short- and long-term effects for companies of adopting a safer by design approach can help them make the right decisions when faced with difficult strategic choices.

Finally, the safer by design approach can lead to a genuine paradigm shift in the way organizations are managed, which is why it deserves a place in a book dedicated to managerial innovation.

In this article, we begin by defining what safer by design means today.

We then detail how the approach has been structured empirically, based on distinct fields of application.

Finally, we draw up a diagnosis of the managerial implications and tensions that could arise from its generalization.

Our aim is clearly to give tomorrow's managers the keys to integrating this approach into their activities, while avoiding the pitfalls.