Mass Customization & Open Innovation News

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!)

US Think Tank CED Demands Openness to Foster Innovation: Open Source Software, Open Standards, and Open Innovation Promote Economic Growth

The discussion of the underlying core principle of open innovation -- free access to existing knowledge to reuse this information for new problem solving in another domain -- interferes very often with the existing regimes of Intellectual Property Law, which are one of the main hurdles of open innovation. Thus, the new report 'Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness' by the Committee for Economic Development (CED), a business-led public policy group, got my interest. In this group, 200 large US corporations (!) demand more openness of intellectual property. This is a very important debate, and if you want to benefit from open innovation, you should care about it!

Here is a summary of the report by PR Newswire :

Increased openness in the creation of computer software and other digital information products is needed to foster further innovation and economic growth for both the United States, and for the global economy, warns CED in a new report.

"Open standards are needed for digital technology to continue to develop and create economic growth in the information age," said Paul Horn, Senior Vice President Research, IBM Corporation. "Additionally, open innovation is propelling change in commerce beyond the borders of software and information technology, even into physical goods," Mr. Horn continued.

The report calls openness "an underlying technical and philosophical tenet of the expansion of electronic commerce" that will "cause transformations in the economy and society." Digitization of information and the growth of the Internet have profoundly expanded the capacity for openness, which can be viewed largely as a function of the accessibility and responsiveness (meaning the ability of anyone to make modifications) of a work or process.

Recommendations of the report include:

OPEN STANDARDS: Governments should encourage the development and use of open standards through processes as open to participation and contribution as possible. The DCC believes that the participation of civil society would be beneficial in the formation of standards with important social consequences. Support for open standards has grown dramatically in recent years, but issues surrounding intellectual property claims threaten their development. Perhaps most troubling, firms have a perverse incentive to wait until an open standard is widely utilized before asserting an intellectual property claim, so as to maximize revenues from licensing or from damages. The DCC recommends that incentives be created to induce the early disclosure of intellectual property claims, and that consideration be given to progressively limiting recovery by a firm asserting infringement as time elapses from the adoption of a standard. ...

OPEN INNOVATION: The combination of the internet and the growing importance of digital information products is changing even the organization of creative enterprises and enabling new processes of innovation. Perhaps most striking is the extraordinary increase in "peer production" of digital information products. Many, if not most, of the pages accessible on the World Wide Web are posted by individuals with no expectation of monetary gain. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the result of contributions from thousands of individuals, as are the buyer and seller reviews on eBay. "Open science" is making scientific information available well beyond the subscribers of traditional scientific journals.

To foster open innovation, the report recommends federally funded, unclassified research should be made broadly available. The CED recommends that any legislation or regulation regarding intellectual property rights be weighed with a presumption against the granting of new rights. The burden of proof should be on proponents of new rights to demonstrate with rigorous analysis the necessity of such an extension, because of the benefits to society of further innovation through greater access to technology. Finally, the Council suggests that the National Science Foundation fund research into alternative compensation methods, similar to those created to facilitate the growth of radio, to reward creators of digital information products and accommodate the changes brought about by the digitization and growth of the Internet."

The full report can be downloaded here: http://www.ced.org/docs/report/report_ecom_openstandards.pdf

Custom Wine Making: Elite Vintners

How a modular system brought mass customization to the Canadian Wine Industry

Frequently asked, what is the next big market for mass customization, I always include food in my answer. While difficult to process, only few goods are so crafted for customization. Package size, ingredients, functionality, allergies, preferences, and of course taste are just some of the options where customization can start [One of our former researchers in the TUM Mass Customization Research Group, Stephan Jäger, even wrote his Ph.D. thesis on mass customization of food (thesis in German language)]. But not too many applications are known today.

So I was very much surprised when I learned about Elite Vintners, a Canada based company providing custom wine on the internet. While wine may only classify as food in France, it is a product perfectly suited for customization for the same reason, given all the different preferences and taste. And I was really impressed by this company's approach to customization. They created an online configurator, a real toolkit, to customize your next bottle of wine: www.elitevintners.com. This toolkit is remarkable as it is one of the very few toolkits which enter the field of taste which is much more difficult to describe and customize as fit or functionality (a similar toolkit is IFF's toolkit for industrial food flavors, described in a paper by Stefan Thomke and Eric von Hippel). In the US, Crushpad from San Francisco offers a similar service, but based on personal selling, not an internet configurator of the kind of Elite Vintners.
While for Europeans this kind of blending and mixing of wine concentrates, yeast, an oak "flavors" is still a bit strange, the system just replicates the normal way of wine making in many "new world" wineries. The company purchases high quality grape concentrate, and allows you to mix different grapes, an appropriate yeast and a mix of two oak additives from a large selection of strengths. And, for amateurs in wine making like me, the most impressive option was the alcohol content: You can even choose on a slider how much alcohol you want to have in your custom vintage. Of course the wine is bottled with your custom label and your own brand name on it. And finally, you will be surprised how affordable your custom collection is.

Just have a look on the toolkit and play around. But if your experience is more in drinking than in customizing wine, you may fell as I did: Overwhelmed and puzzled how your custom blend might really taste. Obviously, a web-based system can not offer a simulation of the outcome, but there could be a bit more references and indications, or perhaps a pre-configuration of popular blends with an exact description. The present target group of Elite Vintners are more mature and experienced home wine makers (see http://www.winepress.us or http://www.makewine.com for two user communities of this kind). And for this group, the toolkit and especially the stable and fully automated production process controlled by the toolkit offers a great opportunity to get their own creations in high quality. So cheerio on the next trend in mass customization!

Update: The Roots of Custom Wine Making

After I published this posting, I got great feedback by Tim Vandergrift of Winexpert Ltd, another supplier of custom wine making in Canada. Mr. Vandergrift mentioned that by reading the blog, he thought "Well, mass customization is exactly what we are doing for years" and was so kind to explain me the process of modularizing wine and condifuring at the point of sales:

"The consumer winemaking industry centres around a number of Canadian firms, and relies heavily on the mass customization paradigm. To give some background, the consumer-produced wine industry represents 20% of all wine consumed in Canada, both domestic and imported, and represents in excess of $300 million CAD at retail. Two provinces, British Columbia and Ontario, allow ‘Wine On Premise’, essentially personal wineries where customers may purchase a wine ‘kit’ (unfermented must, the raw material for wine) and contract for the production of small batches (typically 23 liters or roughly 30 bottles). The rest of the country has consumers purchasing the product and removing it to their homes for fermenting and processing.

Our company, Winexpert, produces wine kits equivalent to over 25 million bottles of finished wine every year. Where our mass customization comes in is in both the extent and variety of the product lines, the consumer packaging options (bottles, labels, capsules, etc.) and the value-added services and goods offered—wine related hardware and service items, custom barrel ageing, cellar planning, etc.

Customers begin their process by choosing the kind of wine experience they want by selecting the type of wine they wish to consume: we have five different value levels of kits, which lets the consumer choose not only the cost per bottle of their batch, but also the ageing curve: value-priced kits drink well relatively young but do not offer significant long-term ageing potential, while higher-end kits are less rewarding to drink immediately, but reward ageing with higher quality.

Because we source raw materials from wine regions all over the globe, we can offer French, California, Chilean, South African, Australian, etc, versions of the same varietal (i.e., the customer can choose between a muscular, fruit-forward Australian Cabernet Sauvignon, or the leaner, more elegant and structured French Cabernet) or even single-vineyard designated wines, such as Stag’s Leap Vineyard Napa Valley Merlot.

Outside of the ability to choose from over 70 different products in our line, the customer is able to choose a wide variety of packaging options, bottles come in different size, shape and color variations, there are thousands of pre-printed labels available, as well as partially printed stock labels that allow for either in-store overprinting of custom images and text, or at-home use. Bottles and labels are complimented by matching (or contrasting) capsules to finish the look of the package. This integrates a personalization element into our customization effort."

Re-Post: Mass Customization of Software (from the MC Newsletter 2/2004)

Re-Post: I have republished these articles to make them better accessible for search on the blog. This article has been published first in the Newsletter No. 2/2004.

This guest article by Jorn Bettin, Managing Director of SoftMetaWare, a consultancy that provides strategic technology management advice, introduces the mass customization concept as it applies to the development of mass-customized software products.

In the software engineering community the techniques and technologies necessary for mass customization of software are part of the discipline of software product line engineering. Mass customization of software is somewhat different from mass customization in other industries, where the transition is from mass production to mass customization.

In the software industry the transition to mass customization is about providing an economically superior alternative to both of:

* Manual development of off-the-shelf software products, which may or may not be configurable/customizable, and where the total cost of ownership is driven upwards not only by high costs for the base product, but also by very high costs for configuration and implementation.

* Manual development of expensive one-of-a-kind custom applications.

In other words the paradigm shift is from "massive manual customization and configuration" to "massive automated customization and configuration". The main objective is to raise the level of abstraction of software product specifications to a level that relates to the problem space rather than the solution space (software technologies).

The first step towards mass customization of a software product is the derivation of design templates for software products of a certain type from one or more prototype product instances. The design templates are then used in conjunction with user supplied specifications for a specific product to automatically generate a corresponding product instance.

In the world of software it is very easy to expose thousands of configuration options and switches to users, and the varying needs of customers have led vendors to continuously increase the degree of configurability of their products. Enterprise resource planning systems provide a prime example of extremely complex configurability, and in fact this complexity has become a major cost issue for those wanting to implement such systems.

Software product line engineering tackles this problem head-on by ensuring configuration knowledge is presented to the user in an intuitive format, and by ensuring the user can't create an "illegal" configuration. For example, when configuring a product, the user should be provided with a single selection of the country that the software is used in, rather than separately needing to specify country-specific address formatting rules, date formats, legislation options for accounting, etc. In software product line engineering a process of domain analysis is used to uncover the deep domain knowledge required to build domain-specific [configuration/specification] languages that prevent users from creating "illegal" configurations. In many cases software product instances can be drastically simplified by applying some product specifications at "product generation time", i.e. before the software is compiled and deployed in a specific environment. This approach minimizes the post-installation configuration effort, and often it also reduces the overall size of the software, which is less of an issue for enterprise systems, but can be an important factor in the development of embedded software.

So far the theory. In practice, time-to-market requirements usually don't allow the significant ramp-up period postulated by most software product line engineering methodologies. At OOPSLA'03 (http://www.oopsla.org), a group of researchers and practitioners met in a birds of a feather session to share their experiences. The objective was to define the foundation of a new paradigm for software development that builds on software product line engineering principles, but which also is compatible with the principles of the Agile Manifesto (http://www.agilemanifesto.org). The result is a paradigm called Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD).

The relationship between MDSD and software product line engineering can be compared to the relationship between Component Based Development and Object Technology: One builds on the other, and the terminology of MDSD can be seen as an extension of the terminology for software product line engineering. The concept of core assets from software product lines carries through into MDSD and is directly reflected in "Industrialized Software Asset Development", the subtitle of MDSD.

What sets MDSD apart from classical software product line engineering is the emphasis on a highly agile software development process. One of the highest priorities in MDSD is to produce working software that can be validated by end users and stakeholders as early as possible. This is consistent with the major shift towards agile software development methodologies in the industry. MDSD provides the scalability that is not inherent in popular agile methodologies such as Extreme Programming.

Further Reading

Model-Driven Software Development, http://www.mdsd.info

Jorn Bettin, 2004, Model-Driven Software Development: An emerging paradigm for industrialized software asset development, http://www.softmetaware.com/mdsd-and-isad.pdf

Jorn Bettin, 2004, Model-Driven Software Development Teams: Building a software supply chain for distributed global teams, http://www.softmetaware.com/distributedsoftware-product-development.pdf

Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, Software Product Line Practice, http://www.sei.cmu.edu/plp/plp_init.html

Contact the author at Jorn Bettin, [email protected], www.softmetaware.com, Tel +64 9 372 3073

Rapid Manufacturing Platform promotes information and discussion on main technology enabling mass customization

The term rapid manufacturing (RM) refers to the generation of production components either directly on an rapid production machine or as part of the process chain, using similar technologies as known for rapid prototyping. The idea is to produce finished manufactured parts, not prototypes. The benefits of RM over many conventional production processes are easy to appreciate -- it completely removes the expensive process of producing tooling. In principle, parts can be manufactured as soon as the design process has been completed and changed at the touch of a button. This makes RM the perfect manufacturing technology for mass customization in many areas.

But until we are at this state, there are still many steps to go. Most of today's applications involve relatively small quantities of (small) parts. In fact, Terry Wohlers, a leading rapid manufacturing expert, states that it is unlikely that RM will ever reach the production capacity of processes such as injection molding, die casting, or sheet metal stamping. For many mass customization companies this may not matter. Nevertheless, for most organizations RM is still seen as science fiction.

This is why two European research organizations, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft from Germany and TNO from the Netherlands, have initiated the Rapid Manufacturing Platform, an open collaboration platform on the internet to foster exchange of information and knowledge on RM.

Companies and other organizations are invited to visit this virtual counter for all kind of information regarding RM. The website contains publications, case studies and scientific papers to show RM capabilities. There is also a forum to raise a question or start a discussion with experts in the field. The forum is coordinated by Anton Gerrits from TNO [Anton.Gerrits AT tno.nl]. He invites managers and scientist alike to use this forum and contribute with their own material.

Have a look at http://www.rm-platform.com

Ping Fu, CEO of Mass Customization Enabler GeoMagic, named "Entrepreneur of the Year" by Inc. Magazine

Dr. Ping Fu was a featured speaker at the last MCPC 2005 conference in Hong Kong, and has been now named the "Entrepreneur of the Year" by Inc., a leading US business magazine.

GeoMagic develops and distributes a software, which allows to generate on-the-fly real time virtual models out of optical 3D scans. The so called DSSP process allows that millions of data points become an impeccable virtual model of the original part, ready to be measured, tested, tweaked, and reproduced. On the MCPC 2005, Ping Fu demonstrated how this process has been applied from helping dentists to produce dental components up to scanning and virtually modeling the Statue of Liberty.

But in the December 2005 issue of Inc., John Brant tells the story of the person behind the technology and how a team of wife and husband created these solutions. It is a really great, and also very stirring story very worthwhile to read:

"Over the past decade, Geomagic has defined and dominated the high-tech field of digital shape sampling and processing, or DSSP, which entails scanning an object with optical beams, then rendering it on a computer screen in full three-dimensional fidelity for manufacturing, testing, and inspection purposes. In the past five years, Geomagic's revenue has grown by 2,105%, to around $30 million a year.

DSSP technology holds so much promise because it is universally applicable; any object, animate or inanimate, natural or manmade, of any shape or size, still or, in some cases, moving, can be digitally processed. Within the past few years, DSSP--and Geomagic--has transformed the hearing aid and dental tech industries, helped digitally preserve the Statue of Liberty, streamlined the manufacturing process for Fisher-Price dollhouses, and recreated engine manifolds for a NASCAR racing team. Last summer, DSSP crossed into public consciousness by playing a key role in the perilous landing of the space shuttle Challenger; relying on Geomagic software, NASA engineers scanned and inspected the spacecraft's damaged shuttle tiles with a 10-foot-long robotic arm, and subsequently determined that they could safely withstand the stress of reentry into Earth's atmosphere.

While 2005 represented a breakout year for the company, an even brighter future beckons--and not just for Geomagic, but for manufacturing itself. By the end of the decade, three-dimensional DSSP technology promises to become as common as two-dimensional computer graphics are today. Ping's dream of mass customization, in which DSSP technology allows custom-made locally produced goods to be manufactured as cheaply as mass-produced outsourced ones, might come to pass. "

Read the full story here.

MIT Conference: Product Families and Platforms: From Strategic Innovation to Implementation (Nov 9-10, 05)

2005 Innovations in Product Development Conference
November 9–10, 2005, MIT Stratton Center (Building W20-307)
http://cipd.mit.edu/pd/index.htm

Join us at MIT for this important two-day conference on product platform design and product family management, which is organized in conjunction with MIT's Center for Innovation in Product Development.

The event will be entirely focused on the topic of product families and platforms. Rather than designing one product or service at a time, many firms have realized that they can increase their market share and profitability by offering strategically positioned families of products. In many cases these families can be developed based on scalable or modular platforms, which allow leveraging the benefits of commonality and standardization, while responding to the challenge of increasing mass customization.

Keynote speakers:

Professor Marc H. Meyer, Matthews Distinguished University Professor, Northeastern College of Business Administration. Lead Author of "The Power of Product Platforms"

Mr. B. Joseph Pine II
Author of "Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition". Literally wrote the book on the subject, loves to say that "Mass Customization will be as important in the 21st century as Mass Production was in the 20th."

Organizing Committee:

Prof. Olivier de Weck, MIT
Prof. Timothy Simpson, Penn State University
Prof. Chris Magee, MIT – Director CIPD
Dr. Suzanne Woll, United Technologies Research Center

For more information and regsitration go to http://cipd.mit.edu/pd/index.htm