Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment The article is based on a qualitative study of how green issues affect the R&D work in two large Swedish manufacturing firms. Both internal (environmental staff, top management) and external (regulators) actors drive the greening processes and our firms seem to be far reaching in their green works. In our discussions, we rely on a dynamic model of organizational change to emphasize that if green issues, in our cases perceived as strategic issues, are to change the firm and its R&D work, there has to be a focus on not only technological (tangible) components, but also on cultural (intangible) aspects. A proactive environmental product development strategy might therefore benefit from widening its focus to the whole organization. In addition to a more holistic approach, a basic argument in the paper is also that if green issues are to FROM ISSUES TO CHECKPOINTS AND BACK: MANAGING GREEN ISSUES IN R&D Tomas Blomquist 1 * and Johan Sandström 2 1 Umeå University, Sweden 2 Örebro University, Sweden Business Strategy and the Environment Bus. Strat. Env. 13, 363–373 (2004) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/bse.402 survive, they have to be kept evergreen. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. Received 9 January 2003 Revised 26 September 2003 Accepted 5 November 2003 STRATEGY, ENVIRONMENT AND R&D WORK O ur interests in this article relate pre- dominantly to how green issues lead to organizational change and what strate- gies are developed and applied in the process. Specifically, our aim is to explore how firms’ innovative cores, otherwise known as R&D work, approach these issues and how they change the way of working in the organization. In our account, we begin by outlining our theoretical framework. We rely on traditional organization theory, organizational change and strategic management, and summarize our discussion in a model of organizational change. This is followed by a section on green issues as strategic in R&D work. The empirical part is based on interviews with R&D and environmental staff and managers at two large * Correspondence to: Dr. Tomas Blomquist, Department of Busi- ness Administration, Umeå School of Business and Economics, Umeå University, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden.