Sessions
KeyNote: Frank Piller and Fabrizio Salvador
Tuesday Oct 6 2009
13:00 - 13:40
Sampo Hall
Chair: Mikko Ruohonen, University of Tampere
KeyNote:
Frank Piller, RWTH Aachen University,
and Fabrizio Salvador, Instituto Impresa
Cracking the Code of Mass Customization
As firms increasingly consider the heterogeneity of customers’ needs as a business opportunity rather than a problem, Mass Customization is becoming more and more popular in industry and academia alike. Despite the accomplishments of past research on this topic, little progress has been made in terms of identifying which strategic capabilities a firm has to develop when pursuing Mass Customization.
Starting from this premise, we set forth a theoretically-motivated re-conceptualization of the requisite strategic capabilities for Mass Customization – namely, Solution Space Definition Capability, Robust Process Design Capability and Solution Navigation Capability.
Besides providing real business illustrations of these capabilities in action, we also discuss the advantages of the proposed re-conceptualization and, borrowing from the Resource-Based View of the firm, we show how the proposed conceptualization contributes to explain the sustainability of a Mass Customization-based competitive advantage. We conclude by offering a few practical caveats for those managers and entrepreneurs who wish to explore the countless possibilities of mass customization.