Mass Customization & Open Innovation News

Mass Customization Gets Its First Novel: UK author Sean McManus explores personalized music

Interview: Sean McManus on personalized music, customized books, and why he is using on-demand service Lulu -- and the background of his idea to write a novel featuring a mass customized service offering as its key element.

Sean McManus is the author of ‘University of Death’, a new novel satirizing the music industry. The book explores what happens when a major record label comes up with software for mass customizing music and uses spyware to sell it to customers, without telling them it’s all computer generated. Sean’s previous books include ‘Small Business Websites That Work’ and ‘The Customer Service Pocketbook’. As a journalist, Sean has written for Making Music, Melody Maker, Internet Magazine, Business 2.0, Internet Works and many more. And he has covered mass customization before: In May 2000 he wrote the mass customization essay ‘As you like it’ about for Personal Computer World magazine and in December 2005, he interviewed the company behind Erasure’s customized MP3s for his website at www.sean.co.uk.

Sean, Congratulations! You have written the first novel I know with strong references to personalization and matching-services in the music industry! What's the story?

It's a satire of the music industry, centred around one of the last surviving major record labels, Bigg Records. Clive Bigg is gobbling up independent labels and marketing lowest-common-denominator tosh made by boybands. It’s not enough, though, and like every other label, he’s seeing his business shrink away.

Then one day the solution arrives: a smooth-talking geek called Jonathan Harrington has spent ten years creating the perfect song: moving enough to make you laugh, cry, or dance on the first listen. The catch is that it’s computer generated and tailored for each listener after analysing his or her music collection. Together, Bigg and Harrington conspire to use hidden software to study what fans listen to, and then to automatically concoct and market their dream music to them.

While all this is going on, the story also follows the progress of Dove, who is burned out from touring for decades. He wants to break up his 'creatively bankrupt' band, University of Death, but he couldn't do a proper job. Now Bigg's bought up the indie label the band was on, he's about to make Dove an offer he can't refuse.

And the story also follows two of Dove’s biggest fans: Simon and Fred have a band called Goblin (performing a mix of rock and glam they call 'heavy tinsel'). Like many bands today, they can't get anyone to listen to them, and hope that Bigg will pluck their demo from the pile and launch their careers. As well as doing their own stuff, they cover University of Death in the hope that they'll catch someone's ear. As it turns out, their cover gets them into all kinds of trouble...

Dove, Simon, Fred, Jonathan and Bigg all collide in a finale that threatens the very existence of the music industry.

The story takes a slice through the music business: from the board room to the stage; from the studio to the record fair. It explores how fans relate to their favourite bands, how businesses use technology to manipulate consumers, and what would happen if the music industry disappeared overnight.

Where did you get the idea for this book?

In the 80s I remember typing in a program listing that created music on the Amstrad/Schneider home computer. It sounded a bit foreign and unstructured to me, but it started a fascination with computer generated music that I’ve had ever since.

In recent years, we’ve seen the internet become a channel for both marketing and market research. We’ve seen the rise of technologies that make mass personalisation possible. And we’ve seen record companies backed into a corner and taking desperate measures to prevent piracy, epitomised by Sony BMG putting software on music CDs which was widely considered to be spyware. We’ve seen the start of artificial intelligence as part of our e-commerce applications, with Amazon knowing my taste in books and music better than I do. And we’ve seen the rise of independent bands through communities like MySpace, where high quality music can be shared and sold outside the conventional music industry. All these threads came together in my plot. It’s a timely book. In fact, when the Sony BMG story broke, it felt like my plot was starting to come true!

‘University of Death’ is ultimately about why people love music, and where its soul is. The book explores the extent to which that can be automated or faked. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that (in my novel at least), music needs to come from people, not machines. I listen to a lot of synthesiser music, but that works because there’s a creative person directing it and the computers are just being used as instruments. Even Brian Eno’s generative music, which is unique each time you listen to it, works because a creative musician has defined its parameters before it runs. The question is whether the software will one day be good enough that you couldn’t tell the difference between a computer inventing and performing a song, and real human creativity.

I know your early essay on mass customization (still a well linked source on the topic on the internet). Have you written any other books in the meantime?

I’ve written ‘Small Business Websites That Work’, published by Prentice Hall, and co-authored ‘The Customer Service Pocketbook’. There are free chapters to download from both at www.sean.co.uk.

Why did you want to write this book?

They say everyone has a novel in them. This is mine: it includes so many of the things I love - music, technology, record collecting, old computer games, jokes. But all of them in service of a story and bound together by a single theme. Everyone has something that they just know they have to do in their life, and writing a novel was one of mine.

It's been a long time since I've devoted that much energy to a single project, and it was extremely satisfying. I really enjoyed the writing sessions.

What are your observations on personalization of music in the real world? How often are you, as a consumer, using these services?

The most exciting thing for me has been Trust Media’s customised MP3s, made on-demand using a Flash interface. Erasure made best use of the concept: you could define what kind of beats, vocals, basslines and synth lines you wanted, as you heard the track looping. When you were done, you paid and downloaded your track. Each combination was limited to a single copy, and had unique artwork. The music industry’s been marketing so-called ‘limited edition’ CDs for years, with serial numbers on them often running into hundreds of thousands. This really subverts that: Having the only copy of my favourite version of a particular song and knowing nobody else can buy it is truly a ‘limited edition’. Erasure really appreciated what they could achieve creatively with this technology, and it would be good to see more musicians adopt it. Trust Media is pushing the antipiracy aspect at the moment: people are less inclined to share something that’s unique to them (and traceable), and others are more likely to want their own unique version than someone else’s copy. When the music industry is suffering a decline, it makes more sense for the company to sell antipiracy software than an experimental music format, even if they’re the same thing.

Brian Eno’s done some interesting work with generative music, where he sets the parameters of the work and then each performance is unique. There’s no computer creativity involved in this: it’s still very much his work, with the computer randomly generating each performance of what is essentially one work. His first release of generative music ran on floppy disk and the software is obsolete now, but his 77 Million Paintings software brings the idea up to date and combines it with visuals. It’s not really personalised, though, even though each performance is unique, because I have no control over it.

I enjoyed the music recommendation engine Pandora while that was available [in Europe], but that’s been closed to people outside the US now because they can’t afford to pay international license fees. Last.fm is a nice recommendation engine, but I haven’t used it too much. I still tend to find new music through magazines, reviews online, friends and gigs.

As with publishing, mass customisation has made it viable for bands to sell their own music on CD from the very start. I’ve bought a few CDs by unsigned bands which probably wouldn’t have existed without the mass customisation and ecommerce technology that was used to create and sell them.

And your book is not just on personalization and customization, but I saw on your website that you also are using a print-on-demand service (Lulu.com) to publish it. So why are you self-publishing 'University of Death', and why are you using print-on-demand?

The main reason for using Lulu as my publishing platform is that it enables me to get the book out there much more quickly. I have friends who have written great books and then spent years trying to get interest from a major publisher, while their books have quietly gone stale. I spent two years writing my novel, and I didn’t want to spend another two traipsing it around publishers who are already inundated with other good books. By self-publishing, I can ensure the book reaches readers much more quickly. Because the book deals with many contemporary themes in the music industry and technology, this was important to me.

For a venture like mine, it makes good business sense. There’s no up-front cost working with Lulu, and I don’t have to store hundreds of copies of the book under my bed or in my garage. The downside is that it’s massively more expensive per copy than it would be to do a conventional print run, but it’s an ideal way to test the market for new creative products. I particularly like Lulu because it takes care of the retail side of things too – it handles the credit card or paypal orders, customer service and support. It helps that Lulu tends to rank well in search engines too. Working with Lulu means I don’t have to be involved in handling individual book sales, don’t have to spend up-front, and don’t have to carry stock. It also means customers can have a smooth and fully supported buying experience.

And where can we buy your book?

Thanks for asking! This book is not available in the shops. You can only buy the book at Lulu.com.

When you place your order at Lulu, they'll print your copy, perfect bind it, stick it in a sturdy cardboard wrapper and post it out to you. This book is not available anywhere else because copies don't exist until they're ordered.

You can download the first two chapters for free through www.universityofdeath.co.uk.

To conclude: What is, in general and beyond your industry, the greatest mass customization offering ever – either one that is already existing or that you would like to get in the future?

I’m not sure whether it counts as my industry or not, but I’d like to see more done on books. Wouldn’t it be great if I could instruct an intelligent agent to create a book about ‘Pink Floyd’, or even ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, and have it deliver a unique printed artefact to my door? The software could source newspaper clippings and reviews from leading publishers, maybe some blog posts from well-respected fans too. It could sort them into chronological order, and source images from leading photo libraries. It wouldn’t be easy: there’s a whole rights nightmare to resolve, and the micropayments could prove tricky to administer, particularly once you get down to the level of paying freelance journalists. But if the infrastructure was there, the content would follow. And you could create an interface for narrowing the search to something useful (eg, let users specify publication dates, proportion of blog content to newspaper content, number of images etc). Books are still the best way to communicate and digest large chunks of information, but at the moment, there needs to be a significant market for each book to make it commercially viable. That’s because somebody has to do the leg-work of writing each one, and someone else has to market and distribute it. If you want a book about 90s band ‘Kenickie’ (as I do), you’re probably the only one, so you’re out of luck.

We can already do much of the stuff required: we have good search algorithms, there is a lot of tagged content out there, and there are applications that create PDFs on demand, and others that print them in books. We already trust search engines to decide what content we should see online, so this would be an extension of that and would probably work best if restricted to trusted content providers named up-front. It could be a great way for rights owners to make money from archive material and for researchers or enthusiasts to access original reports from the archives.

This is all probably some way off. Still, I can recommend a nice novel to read in the meantime… ;-)

Why Mass Customization Fails: It is the human factor, Ben Moore and Clint Lewis propose in a new book

In a new book, Ben Moore and Clint Lewis are looking on the success factors of mass customization and customer-centric manufacturing strategies (The Consumer’s Workshop: The Future of American Manufacturing). Their main finding: People matter most for successful mass customization. This may sound like a simple truth, but confirms an understanding I got from working with many companies in the area as well. MC is enabled by technologies, but put in place by dedicated people.

Ben is the President of Agent Technologies, Inc., and Clint the President of Lewis Group Consultants (LGC), two operations and manufacturing consultancies in the United States (a more detailed bio can be found here).

Ben offered to summarize his key findings in a small guest article to my blog, which you find in the previous posting. In an additional interview, I asked him what motivated their research on mass customization and how they did derive their findings.

What did motivate your research on mass customization?

Ben Moore: I've always had an interest in mass customization even before my participating in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project entitled Autonomous Agents at Rock Island Arsenal (AARIA) back in 1995; in this project we built a simulation to demonstrate a factory scheduler capable of mass customization based on autonomous agents that actively represent each step of manufacturing a part. Since this project and the growth of personalization tools, I've researched mass customization tools and techniques in an attempt to find the best system for consumers to create unique products and for manufacturers to efficiently manufacture these products.

What is an example of a company "that got it", i.e. that has a sustainable mass customization strategy that is both scalable and build-to-last -- and that understood the HUMAN FACTOR.

BM: I've found the HUMAN FACTOR to be the least understood and valued of companies. John Deere gets mass customization tools and techniques, but their people systems don't compare to the people systems in companies like Procter & Gamble (P&G) and General Electric (GE). P&G and GE don't focus on mass customization, but focus on customization through standardization and systemization that allows the creation of new products and machines; P&G and GE really get it with their people systems.

What would be your main advice for a manager that wants to start a mass customization initiative?

BM: I recommend really looking at the reasons and financials for a mass customization initiative versus some level of customization initiative. In some manufacturing companies, like capital equipment manufacturers, each product/machine is different so it makes sense to create processes and tools to efficiently manage the customer requirements and deliver these unique products/machines profitably. In many other companies, I've found that creating an agile manufacturing system that can be reconfigured / customized to make a wide variety of products to be more profitable.

What is, in general and beyond your industry, the greatest mass customization offering ever - either one that already exists or that you would like to get in the future?

BM: I believe the greatest mass customization offering ever will be health related. People are becoming more health conscious around the globe. Companies that find a way to capitalize on providing a health regiment specifically designed for the individual based on age, weight, diet, family history, lifestyle and behaviors that fits with the delivery system that they are looking for and at a price they find affordable, will win in this space.

Context: Continue reading with an excerpt of Ben's book.

Great Report on User Manufacturing, Mass Customization, and How a New Infrastructure is Providing New Opportunities for SMEs

Last week, I got a note by Steve King, a research affiliate with the Institute for the Future. This is a non-profit research group based in Silicon Valley. Founded in 1968 by a group of former RAND Corporation researchers with a grant from the Ford Foundation to take leading-edge research methodologies into the public and business sectors, the IFTF today publishes reports to help people and companies to understand what is coming next.

They recently released a forecast report that is part of a series on the future of small business. In this report, they stress that small businesses will actively take advantage and use new manufacturing methods to create mass customized goods.

The report was sponsored by Intuit and can be downloaded on their website: http://www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness/ (download Report #3)

In the report, IFTF writes about a new artisan economy that is the result of new manufacturing technologies, enabling individuals to access similar production technologies as large corporations (crafters using Ponoko, see previous posting, are a perfect example). It is a very nice summary of many of the recent trends that I have discussed here. Fabbing, blogging, user manufacturing, customization, open innovation -- it's all there and brought into a nice and coherent framework.

I especially liked the part about the new infrastructure that is enabling these developments:

"Plug-and-play infrastructures will make small businesses more competitive and successful. The ability of small businesses to take advantage of large-scale infrastructures and leverage new technologies will allow them to enter and compete in industries formerly served only by big business."

As an example, they refer to a great service that is enabling moms to become entrepreneurs, Mom Inventors, Inc.:

"For those who want to avoid teh hassle of assembling these services, firms are available to do everything for an entrepreneur. Mom Inventors Ic., for example, weill develop, manufacture, and sell quality Mom invented products throughout the United States and Europe. The mom (entrepreneur) only needs to come up with the idea, Mom Inventors will do the rest."

So I am expecting to these many more knitted marvels and clever kitchen aids on the shelves, invented by "Lead Moms".

In an e-mail exchange, Steve told me more about the background of the report, and stressed another implication from their research:

"A major issue we are trying to figure out is how small business relates to mass customization and user innovation. This was originally prompted by our work looking at consumer generated media - specifically blogs.

We found that the blogs with the most traffic were not authored by consumers, but by professionals. The professionals tended to fall into two categories: (1) small or independent businesses trying to build a small publishing business; or (2) professionals using blogs to promote either themselves or the goods and services of their company. Looking deeper at the second group, we found that most of them worked for small businesses.

Based on this work (which we did several years ago), we started looking at other categories. We quickly found a similar pattern of small business participation across a broad range of categories, including media (YouTube videos, etc.), open source software, crafts and small scale manufacturing (a lot of Makers at Maker Faire are small businesses, for example), financial services, etc.

Basically, we saw small businesses playing a role in almost every category where niche products and/or services were being built or highly customized. We also found a pattern of category "power users" moving from being hobbyists to starting their own small businesses. We kept seeing "prosumers" turning into small businesses, and we kept seeing small businesses somewhere in the customization value chain."

Accordingly, another area indicated in the report where small businesses will grow in the future is to serve as an innovation lab for larger corporations. Platforms like Innocentive or P&G's connect and develop program will help small businesses to sell their creativity to larger corporations in an efficient way. This may be the next wave of contract research.

Overall, a nice summary of recent trends that is worthwhile reading due its focus on small businesses.

Context: Get the full report here. http://www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness/ (download Report #3)

Design & Configuration of Complex Products -- Insights From DTU's Product Modeling Group, one of Europe's leading centers on the mass customization

Lars Hvam and his colleagues at Denmark's Technical University (DTU) in Copenhagen have built one of the world's leading research groups in the area of product configuration and modular product design. Their approach is that you not just should build a configurator or sales system for your existing products, but hat successful configuration and mass customization demands a dedicated modular product architecture that should be developed together with the configurator.

Their work is very much driven by industry input. Lars chairs a huge industry interest group with more than 40 company members, many of them world market leaders in customization. The group is one of the strongest pillars in our community of mass customization researchers, and you have two chances to interact with them in the next weeks -- and a new book is summarizing their recent research:

(1) Industry Meeting on "Product Modularization & Variety Reduction" on Jan 31, 2008 in Copenhagen.

The presentations at the meeting will include experiences from applying the principles of product modularization for managing and reducing the number of product variants at Rolls Royce Marine, Siemens and LEGO - see the agenda and register for the meeting at this link. All presentations will be held in English!

(2) PETO’08 Conference on Service customization

As reported before, Kasper Edwards and Lars Hvam from the Technical University of Denmark are hosting this European MC event in 2008. More information here.

(3) Product Customization - A New Book by Lars Hvam, Niels Henrik Mortensen, and Jesper Riis

From the abstract (I have not received the book yet, so this is just an announcement, not a review):

For the majority of industrial companies, customizing products and services is among the most critical means to deliver true customer value and achieve superior competitive advantage. The challenge is not to customize products and services in itself – but to do it in a profitable way. The implementation of a product configuration system is among the most powerful ways of achieving this in practice, offering a reduction of the lead time for products and quotations, faster and more qualified responses to customer inquiries, fewer transfers of responsibility and fewer specification mistakes, a reduction of the resources spent for the specification of customized products, and the possibility of optimizing the products according to customer demands.

This book presents an operational procedure for the design of product configuration systems in industrial companies, based on the experience gained from more than 40 product configuration projects in companies providing customer tailored products and services.

Published by Springer. ISBN: 978-3-540-71448-4

For any further information in any of the topics above, just contact Lars directly:

Lars Hvam, Chairman of the Association for Product Modeling
Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Management
Technical University of Denmark
lhv@ipl.dtu.dk

I am coming to your desktop: Webinar on Mass Customization Implementation, Trends, and Success Factors

Special discount code for blog readers and early registration price available

Please allow a little bit of self-advertising, but this may be an interesting offer for some of you: Together with Pure Insights, a London, UK, based company offering seminars and webinars on innovation and technology related topics, I am offering a live web-based seminar on mass customization and designing winning configuration systems. This may be a good offer for corporate readers that want to get a convenient introduction into mass customization thinking and product configuration strategies.

Mass Customization and Customer Driven Value Creation:
Implementation strategies for winning by product configuration

Date: 01 Aug 2007, 10:00-11:00am EST / 15:00-16:00 GMT [more time zones]
Location: Your Office

The cost to produce one-off custom products is high, and it affects both front- and back-end systems. But as Forrester Research reports in a recent study (“Why Custom Product Buyers Could Be Your Most Important Consumers“, June 2006), companies find this investment worth as it provides a new channel for manufacturers to reach out to buyers directly, and an opportunity to fine-tune their product mix based on direct observations of consumer behavior — consumers who are opinion leaders with greater than average influence.

Based on our own study of more than 250 mass customizers in consumer and industrial markets, the webinar outlines the building blocks of success full mass customization strategies and provides ideas how to avoid the pitfalls of implementing mass customization. The focus of this session will be on the design and development of product configuration systems or so called toolkits for customer co-design. Rather than commenting extensively on technical details, the session will provide hands-on recommendations on the strategic positioning and implementation of theses central tool of each mass customization strategy.

Session Outline

- What is mass customization and personalization – and what is it not?
- Which recent trends and development enhance these strategies and how is mass customization related to “The Long Tail” phenomena?
- What are the building blocks of a mass customization strategy and what does it demand from corporate functions like product development, manufacturing, and marketing?
- What are the elements of a successful product configuration system?
- What are the risks associated with mass customization? How do you manage these risks?
- Session wrap-up: Idea for further action

By attending you will learn how to:

- Champion and/or lead a mass customization initiative in your company
- Identify opportunities for mass customization and personalization in your industry
- Develop the fundamental competencies a company needs to build a sustainable MC business
- Prepare your company to benefit from mass customization and product configuration systems
- Discover the risks and threads of mass customization and develop successful counter strategies

To register, please go to http://www.pure-insight.com/webinars/mass-customization-customer-value-creation and use promotional code aix (case sensitive!) wenn registering for a 10% discount.

Note: You also can download the webinar after its initial live broadcast – but only when joining live, you can interact and ask direct questions.

All further information can be found here.

Interview: Klaus Moser on Mass Customization Strategies and How to Align Mass Customization with Corporate Strategy

Klaus Moser is a project leader at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and a research affiliate of the TUM Research Center for Mass Customization & Customer Integration, Munich. Klaus is a long-time research partner and was an Executive Ph.D. student in the Munich center. Based on exploratory research in the field of mass customization, he focused his dissertation on the topics of mass customization strategies and competencies. His striking finding: Many firms do not have a dedicated mass customization strategy, but just use this approach to support other purposes – even if they think that their mass customization offering is profitable of its own.

The results of his research have been published recently in a book titled "Mass Customization Strategies". According to the topic, Klaus published his book with Lulu - a print-on-demand publisher. Print on demand means that the book is listed at online retailers and only printed whenever an order is placed. This business model enables the offering of books at a low price (no matter how many books will ever be sold). His projects at Boston Consulting Group focus on strategic, sales and organizational questions, and he has worked for firms within the industrial goods and financial services sectors since the year 2000.

In an interview, we recently talked about his research and what is a good mass customization strategy.

Klaus, in your research you find that many companies have no dedicated mass customization strategy. Why is this?

For many managers mass customization still is a new practice – and a common understanding of the possible benefits of mass customization does not exist. Moreover, most companies focus on operational questions and miss to define a strategy first. But there is an interesting observation I have made – a growing number companies have launched mass customization businesses which are supporting a core business based on either mass or craft manufacturing. In my book "Mass Customization Strategies" I identify seven mass customization strategies – only a few of these strategies are based on the understanding that mass customization has to be profitable on its own.

What is a good mass customization strategy anyway?

There is not one good mass customization strategy – more important is that the mass customization strategy is aligned with the overall business strategy. If the core business of a company is mass production based, than a mass customization offering could for example accelerate the objective of better understanding customer demand and needs. A good example provide Adidas sports shoes. Their mi adidas program is helping the company to gather important information to improve forecasting and design of standard products. Also, mass customization could help a company to demonstrate innovation leadership within one industry. Consider as an example Loewe, a German producer of TV sets. To build their brand and differentiate their company from Asian competitors, they very successfully launches a custom TV business.

So, what is the appeal of mass customization for a growing number of companies? Looking in my e-mail inbox, I get more and more requests of companies experimenting with mass customization? Why is this?

From my research I have learned that companies today better understand the competencies and technologies needed to successfully implement a mass customization concept. For several years, companies have gone through a phase of learning and development. But my striking hypothesis is that companies have now realized that not offering mass customized products and services might imply a competitive disadvantage. A good example is the sports shoes industry – today all major players have implemented a mass customization program: Nike, Adidas, Puma, etc. So managers fear to be left behind, and invest in mass customization. If doing so always is the best option, I however doubt.

How did you come to your findings, what is the background of your research?

My research and findings build on the results of two separate, but coordinated empirical research projects. Both projects were initiated at the Institute for Information, Organization and Management (IOM) – TUM Business School, Technische Universitaet Muenchen. The first project examined mass customization cases in a broader business context. This research project, titled international mass customization casebook project, offers a deeper understanding of the different types of mass customization, and also presents results concerning applied competencies. The second project, the industry research group on mass customization, presents empirical case data confirming the results from the first project. Both projects build on case study research and the results are documented in "Mass Customization Strategies".

What is an example of a company “that got it”, i.e. that has a sustainable mass customization strategy that is both scalable and build-to-last?

Two examples I personally like are Build-a-Bear and 121TIME. Both businesses being quite different from a sales channel strategy have successfully grown their businesses during the last couple of years and both companies have managed to very professionally understand market and customer needs, which I take as a measure of build-to-last.

What are the main challenges in mass customization still ahead?

Companies still struggle with understanding customer needs, since I see that most companies do not tailor their mass customization offering to earlier identify market needs. On the operations side, many companies struggle with missing standards for IT systems and configuration systems – I have made the observation that manufacturing capabilities, for example in the shoe or apparel industry, are often stronger than required IT capabilities. Another observation from my research is that the types of companies changing their focus from a mass manufacturing to a mass customization business model often struggle with proper change management around organization, processes and people.

What would be your main advice for a manager that wants to start a mass customization initiative?

My advice: study and understand best practices of the today's many existing mass customization examples. From the industry research group on mass customization which I have coordinated at the TUM business school I learned that best practice sharing is a successful instrument also when done across industries.

To conclude: What is the greatest mass customization offering ever – either one that is already existing or that you would like to get in the future?

My expectation is that the future of mass customization lays in the bundling of customized product and service offerings in order to fulfill people's overall and not only single needs – I have not seen such an offering so far.

Contact Klaus Moser at klaus@moser-mc.com, www.moser-mc.com

Special Issue on Mass Customization Manufacturing of IEEE Transactions Published

The 2007/1 issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT features 13 papers on mass customization as part of a special issue on Mass Customization Manufacturing Systems. Thorsten Blecker and Gerhard Friedrich edited the following collection. As with most scientific journals, if you are not a subscriber or IEEE member, or have no access to the journal via your university library, getting access to the papers is very costly.

But here is a list of all articles, abstract are all available for free online:

- Selecting a Customization Strategy Under Competition: Mass Customization, Targeted Mass Customization, and Product Proliferation, by Cavusoglu, H.; Raghunathan, S.

- Product Development Cost Estimation in Mass Customization, by Tu, Y. L.; Xie, S. Q.; Fung, R. Y. K.

- Standardized Configuration Knowledge Representations as Technological Foundation for Mass Customization, by Felfernig, A.

- Management of Product Architecture Modularity for Mass Customization: Modeling and Theoretical Considerations, by Mikkola, J. H.

- The Development of a Component Commonality Metric for Mass Customization, by Blecker, T.; Abdelkafi, N.

- How Small and Medium Enterprises Effectively Participate in the Mass Customization Game
Ismail, H.; Reid, I. R.; Mooney, J.; Poolton, J.; Arokiam, I.

-Changeover Improvement: Reinterpreting Shingo's “SMED” Methodology, by McIntosh, R.; Owen, G.; Culley, S.; Mileham, T.

- Process Platform Planning for Variety Coordination From Design to Production in Mass Customization Manufacturing, by Jiao, J.; Zhang, L.; Pokharel, S.

- A Product and Process Modeling Based Approach to Study Cost Implications of Product Variety in Mass Customization, by Zhang, M.; Tseng, M. M.

- Exploiting the Order Book for Mass Customized Manufacturing Control Systems With Capacity Limitations, by Wikner, J.; Naim, M. M.; Rudberg, M.

- Integrated Configuration of Platform Products and Supply Chains for Mass Customization: A Game-Theoretic Approach, by Huang, G. Q.; Zhang, X. Y.; Lo, V. H. Y.

- Modularity as a Strategy for Supply Chain Coordination: The Case of U.S. Auto, by Ro, Y. K.; Liker, J. K.; Fixson, S. K.

- A Service-Oriented Architecture for Mass Customization—A Shoe Industry Case Study, by Dietrich, A. J.; Kirn, S.; Sugumaran, V.

New book: Product Information Systems for Mass Customization

Product Information Management for Mass Customization: Connecting Customer, Front-office and Back-office for Fast and Efficient Customization

A new book on mass customization by two close members of our MC community: CIPRIANO FORZA, Professor of Operations Management and General Management at Padova University, and FABRIZIO SALVADOR, Professor of Operations Management at the Instituto de Empresa Business School, Spain, have published their long anticipated book on product configuration (information) systems for mass customization.

I did not get the opportunity to review the book yet, but given the excellence scholarly work the two authors showed in many previous projects, I am sure this will be a helpful contribution in one of teh core topics of mass customization:

From the announcement: "Those who have successfully managed product information for mass customization carefully avoid disclosing how these esoteric systems work in practice. This is the first book to provide a holistic recognition of the essential aspects of an IT-supported product configuration system. In doing so, it reveals the basic building blocks of these systems, how they support mass customization, how these systems are selected and implemented, what alternative options there are, and lastly, what the operational and strategic implications of these systems are."

Read a sample chapter here.

Deutsche MC-Community (German MC Community): Montagekongress 2007 und Web 2.0 Report von z-punkt

This is a posting in German language with information on a German event and a new German Web 2.0 report.

"Kundenbindung durch reaktionsschnelle Montage" lautet das Thema des 20. Deutschen Montagekongresses, der am 6. und 7. Februar 2007 vom iwb-Institut der TU München veranstaltet wird.

Zu diesem Thema treffen sich an diesen Tagen in München Fach- und Führungskräfte aus dem Bereich Montage. Neben Informationstechnik und Logistik stehen diesmal die Flexibilisierung der Anlagentechnik sowie Baukastensysteme und low-cost-Automation im Mittelpunkt der Veranstaltung.

Referenten sind neben iwb-Institutsleiter Gunther Reinhart u.a. Adolf Kraus, Leiter Logistik und IT bei der BMW AG in Leipzig, Festo-Vertriebsleiter Deutschland Rolf Storr und Michael Freitag, Leiter Supply Chain Management und Logistik der Vaillant Group in Remscheid. Ich halte den Eroeffnungsvortrag am ersten Tag zum Thema Mass Customization und Open Innovation.

Das ganze Programm und weitere Informationen auf der Web-Site der Veranstaltung

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Reminder: DIE Veranstaltung fuer die deutschsprachige MC-Community:

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Web 2.0 Report von Z-Punkt

Z-Punkt, ein deutsches Trendforschungsbüro hat gerade den Web 2.0 Report veröffentlicht, der vor allem Managern, die sich über dieses Thema einführend, aber umfassend informieren wollen, Hilfestellung gibt. Der Web 2.0 Report liefert eine mfassende Analyse des Phänomens Web 2.0 im deutschsprachigen Raum.

Aus der Ankuendigung:

Web 2.0 – was ist dran? Von Consumer Empowerment und Geschenkökonomie schwärmen die einen – aber wer bezahlt die Rechnung? Eine zweite Dot.com-Blase bespötteln die anderen – aber ist das Netz nicht längst erwachsen geworden? Ein gutes Geschäft wittern dritte – aber was ist das Geschäftsmodell?

Der Report analysiert das Thema Web 2.0 aus der User-, Technik- und Businessperspektive. Und gibt so eine eher salomonische Antwort auf die Frage: Hype oder Quantensprung: Der Hype wird ver¬schwinden, das Phänomen wird bleiben – und an Bedeutung gewinnen. Web 2.0 ist keine neue „Version“ des Netzes, wie der Begriff suggeriert, sondern eine Metapher für einen evolutionären Wandel. Gleichzeitig steht Web 2.0 jedoch für etwas qualitativ Neues – für eine neue Art, wie User mit dem Netz umgehen, für neue Ansätze in der Webtechnologie und für einen neuen Zugang zum Business im Internet.

Der Report zieht drei Entwicklungslinien in die Zukunft:

- User-Driven Economy: Der User wird zum Wertschöpfungspartner
- Cybersourcing: Geschäftsfunktionen werden ins Netz ausgelagert
- Mash Up Your Business: Zukunftsmärkte sind Schnittstellenmärkte

Unternehmensprofile von vielen bekannten, aber auch etlichen nicht so bekannten Unternehmen, runden den Report sehr schön ab (z.B. 37signals, Flock, Netvibes, Nooked, qype, AllPeers, Cyworld, Outside.In).

Info: 115 Seiten als PDF im Querformat, Preis: 170 Euro inkl MwSt. Info und Bestellung hier. (HINWEIS: über den Exciting Commerce-Blog bekommen Sie den Report zum Sonderpreis von 140 Euro).

Kontext: Einen ähnlichen Report gibt es vom Erfinder des Begriffs Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly: Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices , O'Reilly Media, 2006, 101 S., PDF, 375$

Buzzword Collection: Wikinomics Is the New Crowdsourcing

Don Tapscott has been one of my favorite authors for a long time with regard to everything on the digital economy. Finally, he is also jumping on the co-creation and crowdsourcing trend and comes up with a new book on the topic with the wonderful title 'Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything'. Together with co-author Anthony Williams from New Paradigm, a think tank focused on business innovation, the book promises to provide an easy-to-read discussion along the line of Benkler's Wealth of Networks thinking.

The book will be published at the end of the month, and once I have it, I will post a review. But I already wanted to provide you today one more buzzword to impress your colleagues at the next holiday party: The next trend in business is Wikinomics.

From the announcement of Wikinomics:

"Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success. ... Wikinomics builds on this research elucidating a new age where thanks to the Web 2.0 masses of people can participate in the economy like never before—creating a TV news story, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing a school text, inventing a new cosmetic, or even building a motorcycle."

Along the promised case studies, only the first in this list is new to me, but sounds very interesting:

• Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc. CEO, former investment banker, and gold mining newbie, who used open source tactics and an online competition to breathe new life into a struggling business cobbled by the rules of an old-fashioned industry.

• Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production that will revolutionize markets and firms.

• Smart, multibillion dollar companies like Procter & Gamble that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems that create value more effectively than hierarchically organized businesses.

There is also a web site with some more information. And Dan Farber of ZDnet has a video interview with Don Tapscott.

Update on Music Personalization: Bas Reus analyzes Last.fm and Pandora Media

Some time ago, I wrote about different sites where you can personalize your music. Bas Reus, a student of information sciences at the University of Amsterdam, recently finished his master's thesis on customization in the internet economy, comparing different custom music services.

Now, Bas posted his entire thesis online. It is a great study on a good methodological and scientific level. His main research question is the relation between digital products, mass customization and variety. Building on earlier literature, Bas formulates a number of hypotheses on the relation between variety, the level of customization, the consumer search costs.

The case studies on Last.fm and Pandora show that variety does not necessarily leads to more complexity and higher search costs. On the contrary, Last.fm and Pandora try to increase the interaction between the site and the user to consumers to discover new digital products – and in turn benefiting from referral fees when users purchase this music.

His conclusions:

- Instead of lowering the average interaction length of time (as suggested often in the literature), it may be desirable to increase the average interaction length of time between the supplier and the consumer.

- Instead of lowering search costs for consumers, it is desired for them to discover as much as new products as possible.

- The thesis also stresses the "theory" of the long tail, where abundance of information is something to strive for, benefiting users. But this abundance needs useful customization possibilities to minimize the search costs for consumers.

Read his entire thesis here.

Context information:
- Older post on personalization of music.
- Bas Reus' Blog

Why do people want to co-create and to customize?

A new book by Lisa Johnson provides some good answers -- and some great new case studies, too.

Yes, we know today that modern consumers not just want to solely consume, but are active and co-creating and (a few of them) co-innovating – and want just what they want.
But why is this so? This still is one of the fundamental questions – also for companies that want to benefit from “crowdsourcing” or interactive value creation.

To answer it, you either have to rely on heavy sociological texts or studies from anthropologists, or on pretty weak trend assumptions by marketing consultants (I have summarized both discussions in my German MC books).

One of the few exceptions is the great book by Harvard Prof Shoshana Zuboff and her manager husband James Maxmin, “The support economy: why corporations are failing individuals and the next episode of capitalism” (London: Viking Penguin 2002), which contains a great analysis why the (US American) consumer wants more personal service and customized offerings.

The focus of Zuboff and Maxmin are baby boomers, the post-war generation now in its best living and spending age. However, most co-creation activities that are cool in the moment come from younger generations, today 14-to-40-year olds. Also these consumers are savvy, sophisticated, and particular – and they are becoming more and more immune to traditional advertising, while exploring the huge choice of “long tail” markets.

Divided by marketers in the Generation X (30+) and Generation Y (teens and twentysomethings), these groups shape today’s pattern of consumption and value creation. And Lisa Johnson, a marketing consultant, does a great job in her book “Mind your X's and Y's: Satisfying the 10 carvings of a new generation of consumers” (New York: The Free Press 2006) to describe why and how.

What I really liked about this book is that it is all about Web 2.0 and Social Commerce without even mentioning these terms, but bringing them into a more general, better founded and buzzword-free framework.

Her starting point:

“Whether we like it or not, recent technologies have changed how our brains operate. They have altered the way today’s consumers think – not just what they but, but how they buy, how they act and react, and which products and services they find compelling.”

Resulting form this is a different mindset that Johnson calls “the five essential criteria” which describe qualities consumers expect from all kind of products:

- Experience: The desire to get out and try new activities, to explore, text, and see what is possible.

- Transparency: The market as an antispin zone. Full disclosure for companies and consumers alike with accountable choices and decisions.

- Reinvention: Due to fast adaptation of new technologies that allow to do old things differently, markets are a place of constant change.

- Connection: Cooperation of people blending their talents and perspectives to improve the experience for everyone.

- Expression: Anything is possible. The desire to express the layered facets of ones personality and individuality by customization and personalization.

These five criteria inform how consumers operate in the market. And Johnson uses them to describe ten consumer cravings that cross industries and age brackets as they drive – in her opinion – every decision made by members of the Generation X and Y. Let me introduce five of them which seem more relevant for the themes of my blog. While the following quotes describing these trends are pretty much marketing-jargon, their description in the book is actually more profound:

Shine the Spotlight: Extreme personalization gives marketing a new face: "Clamoring for personal recognition. They’re itching to stand out, stand up, and be celebrated with their names in lights (or print or pixels). Brands that tap into this powerful need with highly creative efforts will get not only great buzz, but a whole new level of loyalty and brand ownership to match."

Make Loose Connections: The new shape of “families” and social networks. "This generation is rejecting traditional associations and club-style memberships in favor of loose connections that more accurately reflect their interests, lifestyles and busy days."

Filter Out the Clutter: Editors and filters step into a new role of prominence. "In a world that’s inundated with choices, editing is a critical market phenomenon and an important process in our daily lives. Consumers rely on editors to sift through the raw data and identify the top picks. As a result, many savvy brands are learning to build editing mechanisms into their brands, products, and websites.

Keep it Underground. The rejection of push advertising and the rising influence of peer-to-peer networks. "A select group of people discovers something new, from shoes to bands to politics to neighborhoods, and translates it to satisfy a much wider audience. This is the way of the underground."

Build it Together. Connected citizens explore their creative power and influence change. ".. we’ve only just begun to tap into the power of web-based networks. The Connected Generation is becoming intoxicated by their growing ability to spark change – both as consumer groups and end users. This awareness is spurring mass creativity and launching a power shift away from companies and into the hands of consumers."

And, just for record, the remaining five carvings are:

- Raise My Pulse. Adventure takes its place as the new social currency.
- Give Me Brand Candy. Everyday objects get sharp, delicious, intuitive design.
- Bring it to Life. Everyday activities are orchestrated to deliver a dramatic sense of theater.
- Go Inward. Spiritual hunger and modern media find common ground.
- Give Back. Redefining volunteerism and the meaning of contribution.

Regarding her first trend, Shine the Spotlight and Extreme Customization, she provides a number of good arguments why consumers want this kind of customization and expression of their personality – regarding the need for (mass) customization especially for product offerings that address aesthetic design and personalization:

- People are burned out. “Consumers are cynical and extremely educated about the entire marketing process. Add in a collective obsessions with celebrities, and people everywhere are longing to experience the insider treatment. They want to feel like someone really cares about their dreams and desires.”

- People have seen what is possible. New tools and websites allow consumers to share their unique personalities.

- There’s a sense of entitlement. “I deserve it and I am ready for it now, is the common attitude.

- People want profile in familiar formats.

- People want promotion without the appearance of self-promotion.

To illustrate this trend, Ms. Johnson uses a number of case studies which I personally find not too extreme or convincing, there are much better examples out there (like the new Adidas Pars Innovation Lab, DNA Style Lab’s idea or Build-a-Bear): Jones Soda that allows you to place personal labels on standard soda, Iamtoy.com, who create handcrafted superhero alter egos of your loved ones, DNA Artwork that uses your DNA for a custom picture. But you ge the point.

Among the many other, much better case studies in the remaining chapters of the book, is the venture of an active member of our mass customization community: Andreas Schuwirth (http://www.xxpo.de), who developed a body measurement solution for the bike market that allows a totally new sales experience there. The book describes in large detail the application of this system in a new chain of bike stores in the US, "roll:bike". These stores are envisioned by an industry outside, Stuart Hunter, who wants to provide customers a custom shopping experience with a highly edited and customer-centric store. The book describes here a great case study of an offline-customization (matching) system that really provides customer value.

What the book is missing, however, are all forms of co-creation that go beyond operational marketing or improvements of merit, but which do address topics like lead users or other forms of user innovation (Patty Seybold’s book does a better job here). Ms. Johnson stays in the traditional regime of thinking – but this is also where most co-creation activities do take place anyway.

I could go on with quoting from this book, but just recommend that you get a copy and read it for your self.

Outside Innovation: New book by Patricia Seybold builds a bridge between open innovation & mass customization

Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company's Future, by Patricia B. Seybold. New York: Collins, October 2006. ISBN: 0061135909, about 26$.

This book review has been overdue for more than two months when I got the pre-version of Patricia Seybold's new book, "Outside Innovation". I immediately read it with very large interest, as Seybold is one of the authors I have quoted often in my own books. In her bestselling title 'Customer.com', she provided a great analysis of how the internet is changing consumer markets. So meeting her here in Boston for several occasions in the past year and discussing with her some ideas of her new book was a great opportunity. Here is the result of her recent research: In "Outside Innovation", Patricia Seybold provides one of the first general-management books on co-creation of value between firms and customers.

Well, there have been other books on this topic before (starting with the great, but today almost forgotten book by Rafael Ramirez and Richard Norman on Value Co-Creation [1994: 'Designing Interactive Strategy'], Prahald & Ramaswamy's [2003] highly abstract book on customer co-creation, and of course Eric von Hippel's [2005] fantastic review of three decades of academic research on user innovation in 'Democratizing Innovation'.

But Patricia Seybold's book is full of great and very up-to-date case studies that make the idea of value co-creation really lively and accessible. She describes (in great detail and with plenty of background information) many classic examples like Lego's co-development of the new Mindstorm toy, Threadless, Flickr, BBC Backstage or National Semiconductor, but has also some great new (at least for me) examples of customer-centric innovation like the development of a new fitness machine (Koko Fitness – great story and concept) or SEI Wealth Networks.

And her pitch line why her book is important tackles one of the main problems of integrating customer and users in a firm's innovation process:

"The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes. The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall."

I hope that her books can support more mangers to consider customer/user integration not only as a nice add-on pilot initiative, but to make it a crucial part of the company's core strategy. The book, however, offers no recipes or frameworks how a manager could do so. Its core contribution is to document and describe what is happening in a world that is not any longer dominated by companies creating things FOR users. And as Seybold does this in great detail and style, this record of promising practices may convince managers to turn away from old prejudices.

Patricia Seybold bridges in her book between innovation and operation, between users and customers, between leading edge contributors and average customers. Eric von Hippel strongly differentiates between these levels. He argues that for functional novel innovation, firms have not to listen to their present customers but to search for "lead users" who face a specific need ahead of the market and have turned this need already into a solution for themselves. In many cases, these lead users are in a different domain than the manufacturer and are not its present customers. Gathering input from lead users thus is totally different to market research methods of any kind.

Seybold uses the term "lead customer" to describe a group of a firm's current customers who are truly innovative: "These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about." Getting their input may also be the result of a more conventional market research approach.

This distinction is worthwhile to note when you read the book. Otherwise, without previous knowledge, you may get a bit confused where in her cases real innovation starts and more general customer-focused business strategies end. But as she argues, this is exactly the beauty of co-designing with customers: You start with some small steps, perhaps within the context of a mass-customization-toolkit, and suddenly your customers want more and get motivated to innovate on their own.

My conclusion: A book very worthwhile to buy and read. Its great collection of case studies will inspire you to look for more and deeper information on this topic – or to start to brainstorm immediately how you can benefit from the creative potential of your customers.

For abstracts from the book and an insight into the cases, have a look in Patricia Seybold's blog, http://outsideinnovation.blogs.com.

SAP Info on Open Innovation & Innocentive

While this is an audacious act of self promotion, I still want to guide you to a nice interview I did with SAP Info, the global customer magazine of Software Company SAP. The topic was the U.S. company Innocentive that specializes in Open Innovation. Karim Lakhani, who worked as a Ph.D. researcher in the same group at MIT that I am visiting, got some fascinating performance data on Innocentive, on which I comment in this interview.

The interview answers questions like:

From Open Innovation, it is only a small step to companies developing products with the help of their own customers. Does this mean that manufacturers and customers are once again communicating directly with each other about the products, like in the good old days of the corner shop? Is it possible to prevent submitted entries, even those that haven't won, from being used commercially, patented as someone's own idea or sold on?

Isn't it still more lucrative for someone with good ideas to secure themselves a patent rather than accepting a comparatively small amount of money anonymously from Innocentive?

Does Innocentive have a monopoly at the moment or are other companies already copying its business idea?

How could external and internal innovation specialists usefully share out the work in future?

Open Innovation has been called the "Ebay of ideas". Do you see a danger of people's gift for invention being sold off cheap?

Read the answers and the full interview in English here (the translation from German is not always very good). There is also a version in German language.

Growing Open Innovation Community in Europe: New Book and Executive Course

Heavy conference traffic caused a delay in postings to this blog. On one of these conferences, I had the opportunity to catch-up with Wim Vanhaverbeke, a prof at Technical University of Eindhoven in The Netherlands. Wim is part of a network of researchers around Henry Chesbrough (UC Berkeley) who promote the open innovation idea and develop it further.

Open innovation in their understanding is broader than my usage of the term on this web site. While I use "open innovation" as a continuation of the "open source" idea, with focus on users co-developing solutions for their own use, Chesbrough et al. use the term in the meaning of "distributed innovation" -- means and measures that allow companies to capture the distributed knowledge within a wide network of actors to solve a technical problem. If you have not read Henry Chesbrough's book "Open Innovation" (HBSP, 2003) yet, order it now, it is a great introduction to the idea of distributed innovation.

This group of researchers recently published a new edited book on open innovation research. I did not get a copy of this book yet (and it comes with a very heavy price tag), but it looks like a very interesting compilation of papers around the topic:

Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, edited by Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke, and Joel West, Oxford University Press, USA, $99. (Update: More information on the book can be found here).

From 25-29 September 2006, the editors of this book also organize an European executive education course on "Corporate Entrepreneurship and Open Innovation".

Led by Henry Chesbrough and Kenneth Morse, MIT Entrepreneurship Center, this course teaches the fundamentals of Open Innovation as applied to develop new venturing options for global corporations. The participants will be given the opportunity to develop and refine their own business case, which will be evaluated during the last day of the course by an objective and demanding team of experts.

More information here.

Contact: Prof. Wim Vanhaverbeke, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (W.P.M.Vanhaverbeke@tm.tue.nl)

Mass Customization Case Study Collection -- New Issue of the Mass Customization Journal Published

A new issue (No. 4, Vol 1) of the International Journal of Mass Customization has just been published (see here for more general information). This issue is a special CASE STUDY issue containing eight cases from the International Mass Customization Case Collection, an initiative of more than 25 international researchers collaborating to build a broad basis for empirical research on mass customization. The idea of this project, coordinated by Klaus Moser at TUM, is to document current practices of mass customization businesses in a form that allows rich cross-case analysis and learning from previous experiences.

We are happy that we now can present the first eight cases of this collection in one issue, starting with three cases of mass customization of industrial goods:

* APC, a provider of data centre infrastructure from the US and Denmark,
* MarelliMotori, a manufacturer of electric motors from Italy,
* F.L.Smidth, a Denmark-based manufacturer of complex process plants for the construction industry.

Then, three case studies from the footwear industry provide the opportunity for cross-case analysis in one industry:

* Adidas, an international manufacturer of sports goods based in Germany,
* Left foot, a Finland-based worldwide operating provider of custom men’s shoes, and
* Design&MC Lab, a research lab and model plant for the mass customization of footwear based in the Italian shoemaking capital, Vigevano.

The two remaining cases focus on special objectives connected with the implementation of a mass customization strategy in business-to-consumer markets:

* Steppenwolf, one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of custom bicycles, and
* Turo Tailor, a Finnish manufacturer of apparel (men’s suits).

See here for authors and abstracts of all cases.

Full text access to the cases demands a subscription of the journal. But: Due to the cooperation with the publisher, we now can offer to all past participants of our conferences (MCPC, Deutsche MC Tagungen, IMCM, etc.) full online access to all issues for a very (really!) good price. Please contact me for more information and to get the special subscription form. Disclaimer: I am neither the publisher of this journal nor do I profit in any form from its sales or subscriptions.

Related posts on this topic:

- First issue of IJMassC published
- Special issue on Customer Centric Enterprises published

PS: We are extending this collection. If you want to contribute a mass customization case, please contact me as well (Important: Cases have to be contributed by independent scholars, not by members of the case company described!)