News Story

Durability and Innovation

Thursday 19 Jun 2025

School of Engineering and Innovation researcher Professor Claudia Eckert was recently invited to deliver a keynote talk at the International Conference and Innovation in Engineering (ICIE) in Prague, where she discussed the challenges and opportunities in combining innovation and durability. One way to make products more sustainable is to make them more durable. However, if well-working products meet consumer needs, there is less scope for innovation.

Prof Eckert’s talk took a closer look at what durability means and places it in the context of other -illities. The argument was made that durability is not an absolute property of a product, but manifests differently at levels of system decomposition, which also provides opportunities for innovation. Durability depends on the relationship that individual users have with specific products, which makes it difficult to manage and assess for manufacturers.

Read more about Professor Eckert’s research here: https://profiles.open.ac.uk/claudia-eckert

If you’d like to know more about durability, innovation, and product design, check out our Design and Innovation courses.