The Third Interdisciplinary World Congress on Mass Customization and Personalization (MCPC 2005): Converging Mass Customization and Mass Production (Hong Kong, 18-21 Sept. 2005)
The MCPC conference series is the largest international event to address Mass Customization and Personalization (MCP) from a multidisciplinary perspective. Like the earlier events in Hong Kong (2001) and Munich (2003), the 2005 conference assembled again an international community of scholars and managers to discuss latest achievements in the field.
If you missed this event, you can download the full abstracts of all papers from the website (www.mcpc2005.com). There is also an order form to mail-order the full text proceedings (on CD Rom), containing more than 800 pages of research papers, case studies and reports (price: 95 USD, credit card orders at the conference administrators at Hong Kong Univ of Science and Technology).
Here some of my observations from the conference:
Participants: I was very pleased that this time we could increase the share of practitioners to more than 50 percent of participants. Among them, a number of large US consumer good companies had sent representatives to observe the conference and to get feedback for own upcoming initiatives. We will see a number of exciting new custom offerings in the next year.
Case study track: There was a very strong case study track this year. This provided great insight into the scope and diversity of mass customization. There is not one mass customization concept, but many forms and structures. As a result, we had several parallel conservations about the same term (see here for my recent revision of my mass customization definition).
The apparel people are already very advanced in their application and discussion of the concept. We had some very large Chinese apparel manufacturers and the main technology providers under the participants. For them, mass customization is already a commodity you just have to have to stay in business. But mass customization here is not only about serving individual consumers with custom clothes.
Just consider mass customization on a retail level. Powerful retailers nowadays demand that they get a different assortment of brand merchandise than their main competitors. They demand special editions or variants which can be only bought in their stores. One reason is to prevent direct price competition and to become less comparable. Another important reason is to get also an assortment that fits better to local preferences and trends. Leading brands and manufacturers react on this trend by offering mass customization programs on the retail level. Here, not an end-consumer customizes her custom garment, but a retailer’s representative. Products are produced on demand, and in a small lot size.
In other industries, mass customization is still on a much more abstract level. One small, but very interesting track of the MCPC 2005 focused for example on mass customization in architecture. While many buildings are custom designed per definition, owner or user participation in the design process is just starting. Also, manufacturing in this industry is characterized by rather small and decentralized suppliers. Terms like product platforms, commonality, or interaction toolkits are just being discovered in this industry.
The market for customization: The conference could still provide no answer on the question about the market size of mass customization. Once again, the conference showed that we can not apply traditional market research and forecasting to predict the market size for mass customized offerings. Most customers have no experience with this model, and so they have to experience real offerings of mass customization before they can decide about their acceptance of this model and their willingness-to-pay it. Mass customization remains trial-and-error.
Mass customization demands critical mass: There was a lot of talk about dedicated competences and capabilities for mass customization. Research is progressing in this field, and we discussed the results of several studies and research projects focusing on the unique set of capabilities mass customization requires. I will report in upcoming contributions for this newsletter in more details about the specific capabilities mass customization requires. But: Conference participants agreed that the required competence set is large, and that as a result mass customization demands critical mass – it is otherwise too demanding.
But is seems that customer integration competence is key. The ability to interact with customers efficiently in order to understand their preferences and transfer them into an individual offering is seen as the main cost driver of mass customization (as a result, the system also should be initiated by the actor with access to final customer).
The factor balancing a mass customization system is the selection of the degree of variability (customization options). This decision effects all following decisions. A mass customizing firm gets a main competitive advantage when it has a detailed mechanism how to set and maintain this optimal degree of customization.
Collaboration and interdisciplinary research: And a final conclusion by many participants: To make mass customization happen, we have to cooperate and build multi-disciplinary teams … this conference was all about this! It was a great pleasure to have some many disciplines and backgrounds at one place. Our community of practice is growing – and I am looking forward already to the next meeting.
More information:
The MCPC 2005 web site
Download the program and abstracts of all presentations
Order the conference proceedings here
Report about the China study tour which took part after the conference.
A picture album with conference photos
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