This thesis is about firms determined to gain competitive advantages from environmental demands, about the efforts of engineers employed with the challenge of fulfilling environmental performance targets and about the management and organisation of product development. It is about incremental change, built on established technological knowledge, as well as about radical technological change. In the title, the nation of "environmental compliance" has a dual meaning. It implies that industrial organisations have to comply with ecological constraints, but also that they have to comply more generally with contextual factors such as competition, technology, customer preferences and market characteristics. However to avoid confusion, "environment" will henceforth be used to describe the ecological aspects, which is the traditional meaning of this term in environmental management and eco-design literature.