The 2011 World Conference on Mass Customization, Personalization, and Co-Creation (MCPC 2011): Bridging Mass Customization & Open Innovation
This blog has been titled since many years "MC&OI News" – the most creative name I could imagine to denote my two interests I am writing about here: mass customization (core topic, about 70% of all posts) and open innovation.
However, in the past, these two topics were standing next to each other, with very few posts connecting the two. But I always believed that there are strong overlaps and complementarities between both topics.
And now there even will be a conference to explore these connections: the MCPC 2011 (Nov 15-19, 2011) in San Francisco!
Mass customization, personalization, and co-creation (MCPC) strategies aim to profit from the fact that people are different. Their objective is to turn customer heterogeneities into profit opportunities, hence addressing the current trend of long tail business models. Mass customization means to provide goods and services that best serve individual customers’ personal needs with near mass production efficiency.
Open innovation is the idea that companies should make greater use of external ideas and technologies in their own business, and allow unused internal ideas to flow out to others for use in their business. It is the antithesis of a closed innovation process which relies on internal R&D and deep vertical integration (source).
While developed separately and founded in different theoretical and conceptual backgrounds, mass customization and open innovation are closely linked and can benefit from a broader exchange between both schools of thought:
Open innovation and mass customization are both paradigms that motivate people to participate, to create, to learn, and to recover in order to effectively provide innovative goods and services for satisfying heterogeneous customer needs.
Mass customization can profit from new forms of open process innovation. Implementing mass customization demands new processes and services – new capabilities that are not into place in most organizations. The principles of open innovation provide efficient access to this knowledge and can support the implementation of MCPC business models.
Similarly, open innovation can benefit from mass customization thinking. Using approaches like modular architectures, process re-configuration, solution space design, or choice navigation, open innovation initiatives may become more scalable and efficient while still fitting perfectly to the innovator's situation.
Open innovation and mass customization thinking are merging into innovative business models. Consider the success of MC platforms like Zazzle, Spreadshirt, or Cafepress. These companies have established open business models that enable anyone to co-create their own business, share designs and developments for a fee, and benefits from the experiences of others. The frameworks and theories of open innovation provide new opportunities to study these phenomena.
Open or permissive intellectual property policies are often at the heart of new business models. How do organizations share what they can, protect what they must, and stimulate the widest participation possible in their communities? What can Creative Commons licenses and similar approaches contribute to mass customization and open innovation?
Open hardware is enabling new dimensions of customization. Hardware products (electronics components, but also entire structures like automobiles or even rockets) are increasingly created in community-based models of contributors. IP is distributed via open licenses. One of the core motives of open hardware is to allow high degrees of customization – to offer the next level of customization!
Many mass customization businesses are user innovations. A core principle of open innovation is user innovation. Many innovative products or services originate in the customers' domain – including many mass customization offerings that are the result of an innovating customer becoming an entrepreneur. Looking closer on the origins of mass customization businesses will provide a fascinating area for research on user entrepreneurs and open innovation in start-ups.
In addition, methods for open innovation like co-creation toolkits or idea contests strive to facilitate the input from customers for a firm's innovation process. These tools are closely related to the design of configuration and co-design toolkits. Connecting research in both areas may offer opportunities for better toolkit design.
Mass customization is a service business. Much of the academic research in the field, especially in marketing and configuration experience design, is rooted in the service marketing domain. Here we see plenty of opportunities to bridge between open service innovation and mass customization. We also need to explore how to scale up mass customization in cases where economies of scale are powerful. How do companies like Amazon deliver customization and scale at the same time?
At the same time the MCPC conference is designed as a platform for open (process and business model) innovation: Our objective is to assemble a diverse and experienced audience with different backgrounds to share learnings and what worked (and what did not) in different settings, industries, and countries. We want to stimulate new ideas and to invoke new aspiration for entrepreneurial drive and technical advances.
If you find these conncetions as exciting as I, have a look at the call for papers & presentations for the MCPC 2011 and consider to submit your proposal!! The PDF of the Call for Papers also has many more questions exploring the themes of the conference!
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