Areas of expertise

• Sustainable Product Development
• Ecodesign and support tools regarding sustainability in product development
• Sustainability integration in early product innovation phases
• Sustainability implementation in product development
• Strategic Sustainable Development
• Sustainability transformation
• Digital Sustainability Implementation

Sophie I. Hallstedt is  Professor at BTH. In 2008 she initiated the research area Sustainable Product Development (SPD). Since then, she has developed the research area together with her colleagues and is now supervising four PhD students within this research area and leads a research group of seven. Sophie is leading the research area SPD within the Profile project Model Driven Development and Decision Support as one of the prioritized and selected research tracks at BTH. Her research is about how a strategic socio-ecological sustainability perspective can be integrated and implemented on strategic, tactical and operational levels in companies in order to be able to bring forward sustainable solutions. Several methods, models and approaches have resulted from her research which for example, enhance the ability to measure: i) maturity level of sustainability implementation; ii) sustainability consequences of different solutions, and then; iii) quantify and visualize the progress of sustainability implementation. The purpose of her research is to increase the product design teams’ capabilities to make strategic choices and contribute to a more proactive company regarding sustainability issues and make business advantages out of that.

Sophie has initiated and finalized several research projects. She has been the main applicant and project leader for seven external funded research projects during the last 15 years. In total she has contributed to 78 000 (kSEK) from external funders to BTH research during these years, in the role as main applicant or co-applicant. One example was a KKSHög project of three years, Strategic, Tactical and Operational implementation of Sustainability into the Innovation Process (STOSIP). The research from the STOSIP project was one key reason to a sustainability prize awarded to one of the research partners from their most important customer. In 2020 Sophie’s research within the MD3S project was nominated and qualified to the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVAs) 100-list 2020 – “Research for sustainable competitiveness”. That year 95 of 288 researchers were nominated, qualified and selected to the 100-list, which was officially launched the 2nd of March 2020, see IVAs homepage. (https://www.iva.se/r2b)

Hallstedt has experience in leading academic groups from different roles, such as being the head of department (2011-2013); she is the chair for an international Special interest group for Sustainable Design in the Design Society, https://www.designsociety.org. She is also the chair for the Design Society’s Advisory Board Committee for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, which includes five other Professors from USA, UK, Croatia, France, and Sweden. In addition to that, she has been a supervisor for eight PhD students within the area of SPD and have supervised, so far, six students to their licentiate degree and three students to their PhD degree.

Sophie has also initiated and developed courses and programmes at BTH such as the Master programme in Sustainable Product-Service System Innovation, MSPI, and was the Programme Director during several years until she during two years had the role as Head of the department of Strategic Sustainable Development at BTH. Sophie devotes her teaching efforts to sustainable development and product development courses, both via BTH lectures and via lectures on other universities and in industry on national and international level.