The Technology and Innovation Management Group at RWTH Aachen University focuses on research in mass customization and personalization from the perspective of competitive strategy, the definition of solution spaces, and the design of toolkits for customer co-design. In this context, the TIM group is now asking for your help in an online survey on mass customization.

One of the research interests is to develop a better understanding of the strategic capabilities that form mass customization from a firm perspective. Therefore, the TIM group has now launched this survey to generate a better survey instrument to measure the strategic capabilities by generating a broad list of managerial activities.We kindly ask you to help them with a sorting exercise in form of an online survey, in which you are asked to assign 30 of these managerial activities to one of the strategic capabilities:

To participate in this survey, please follow this link: goo.gl/Zf0wf

The survey will take about 15-20 mins of your time. Thank you very much for your support!

The objective of the KUMAC project is to develop new methods for mass customization providers in the German retail market, which support an increase in productivity and value creation potential of these retailers.

At the half-time conference last week in Aachen, some very interesting first results could be presented to the funding parties, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

In collaboration with industry partners three very concrete applications to enhance interaction between retail companies and customers could be demonstrated to the project consortium:

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The research project REMPLANET (Resilient Multi-Plant Networks) is one of the featured research projects on MCKN. For three years the REMPLANET project, which officially ended in May 2012, was a hub for research on resilience in manufacturing networks. The project was focused on supporting the implementation of network models in non-hierarchical manufacturing networks by developing guidelines, methods and tools. The models and tools of REMPLANET put strong emphasis on the integration of customers in the design of products and manufacturing processes, as well as the responsiveness to customized market demands under a real-time non-centralized decision making context.

Some of the research results of the REMPLANET project are now available online. These results can be found here.

The main focus of this year’s MCP-CE is on customer co-creation being echoed by the following key note speakers:

Frank T. Piller - From Social Media to Social Product Development: Customer Co-Creation

Frank T. Piller is a professor of management and director of the Technology & Innovation Management Group of RWTH Aachen University, Germany. He also is an Executive Faculty Member of the MIT Smart Customization Group at the MIT Design Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Together with Mitchell Tseng, Frank T. Piller initiated and co-chaired the MCPC conference series, the largest professional event on mass customization & personalization. As a member of the board of directors or scientific advisers, he works with a number of innovative technology companies in the area of customer-driven value creation.

Follow him on his blog.

Cipriano Forza - The impact of product configurator use on operational performance: literature review and research agenda.

Cipriano Forza is a professor of Operations Management and General Management at Padova University, Teacher of Research Methodology at the European Institute of Advanced Studies in Management (Italy), Director of the Graduate School in Management and Quantity Surveying, Head of the library of the Department of Technics and Management of Industrial Systems, elected member of EurOMA board (since 2005) where it is chair of the Membership and Finance team (since 2008), organizer of the Workshop on Journal Publishing for Non-Native English-speaking Researchers in OM.

His research interests are: management of product variety, product configuration, mass customization, Lean Production, information systems in operations, management quality and internationalization of SMEs.

Marcel Weber - Paving the Way to Customer-Co-Creation in Innovations.

Marcel Weber is a senior consultant with Altuition. Before joining Altuition in 2000 he used to be a technical officer with the Royal Dutch Air Force for almost 30 years. His specialties are customer insights and co-creation, and new business, product and service development. He has a M.Sc. in Management Science and Business Administration with the Open University in the Netherlands. In April 2011 he got his PhD on Customer Co-Creation in Innovations at the Eindhoven University of Technology.

Robert Freund - Co-Creation and Bottom-Up Economy

Robert Freund is German expert in reengineering, quality management and lean production, an independent expert on Mass Customization and Personalization (MCP) and a distance learning specialist.
Since 1997 his research activities are dedicated to the question on ‘How to overcome the efficiency-paradox on developing and delivering education?’ His concept is based on the combination of Mass Customization and Gardner’s Multiple-Intelligence-Theory.

Follow him on his blog.

During his presentation at the MC2012 conference, Wolfgang Gruel from NBD at Daimler already indicated a major new offering that shall move Daimler into the next area of automotive transportation. Last week, this service was finally announced: MOOVEL

It shall provide a more compelling answer on the question: Why is it necessary that privately owned cars are often used in a really inefficient way, by either standing around most of the time or being driven by only one person where four or more passengers could be transported.

One solution to this could be more car pooling. The idea is not new at all and i being offered in most (if not all) major cities over here in Germany. However, it is kind of revolutionary that a major car company like Daimler starts a project aiming at getting people to do what is, by traditional means, not in a car manufacturer’s interest in the slightest: Buy less “useless” automobiles by using an improved, automated car pooling model.

Daimler, though, aware of their social and ecological responsibility, has just launched a platform that does exactly that: moovel.

The concept is really simple. Moovel is availible either as a (free) iPhone app or via their website. Users can easily offer unused seat capacity availible during a car ride they are going to take, at a certain time and from one destination to another.

Likewise, travelers in need of transportation can enter the time and places they want to go to and are instantly shown information about not only availible seats in privately offered car pool vehicles but also details on commercial rides by buy or tram offered by local companies.

The best about it (especailly if you are used to the often tiresome information-websites of railway companies) is its ease of use. You literally do not have to invest more effort than it takes to alter one short sentense to your needs, by specifying when and where you want to go. The software does the rest, and beutifully so.

Since this is a pilot project by Daimler, the service is in German language and limited to the city of Stuttgart, Germany, for now. If it proves to be successful, though, it might be adopted and coming to a place near you sooner than you think.

So if you understand any German at all, I really recommend taking a quick look, it’s a concept that will be really interesting to watch evolve. More information about moovel on their website.

Are you interested in the issue of setting up a configurator for a mass customization endeavor? Then you might want to have a look at configurator-blog. This insightful German blog introduces different approaches for implementing a configurator successfully, as well as best practice examples of companies who have already implemented configurators.

Mass customization can lead to an overload of choices to be made by the customer, if too many product configuration options are offered. Additionally, some customers are not entirely sure about their own preferences. For these reasons, it is necessary for mass customizers to support their customers throughout the whole decision making process. A configur etruth.com a tor for m etruth.com a ss customiz etruth.com a tion is supposed to n etruth.com a vig etruth.com a te the customer through the process of selecting etruth.com a product th etruth.com a t meets her individu etruth.com a l needs. On his blog the IT consultant Francesco Zappia explains the importance of choice navigation and why you should consider this issue in order to be a successful mass customizer.

MCKN is proud to introduce a new partner project on the platform: KUMAC. The KUMAC project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the call “productivity of services”. As a cooperative project, it involves three scientific partners and three partner companies. The project deals with mass customization in the German retail market, especially the service and interaction processes which are conducted jointly by customers and providers.

The anticipated gain of the project is the development of new methods to increase the productivity and the value creation potential along the whole value chain of mass customization offerings in the retail market.

Their project objectives serve to strengthen the competitiveness of involved companies to ensure sustaining success in today´s highly dynamic and challenging retail markets.

At the same time, these companies will function as pilot companies for testing the new methods. Furthermore, the involved companies will contribute to the diffusion of the project findings in the retail and service sector.

KUMAC will support the MCKN platform by providing content related to the retail industry as well as the service industry. All of you are also invited to join the KUMAC Group on MCKN! To learn more about KUMAC, visit http://www.kumac.de/

The conference leaders would like to tap into the joint intelligence of the MCPC community and ask you to participate in two short conference surveys — results will be posted here:

Mc-future Dominik Walcher and Frank Piller want to learn about your opinion on the market development for mass customization. How is the market of mass customization (MC) and personalization growing? What will be the developments in the next years? Please help to get a better picture of the MC future! Participate here: http://www.tiny.cc/mc-future

Ryan Chin and Daniel Smithwick of the MIT Media Lab, are studying product life-cycle energy use of customized dress shirts to understand how to develop more sustainable products. Please complete their 6-8 minute survey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MCPC2011) on your current dress shirt wardrobe and you’ll be entered into a lottery for a FREE custom men’s dress shirt worth $100 retail value. Pretty fancy stuff. Survey and prizes are open to both men and women!

While the European Commission since many years has supported research on mass customization, they now have issued a specialized call on personalization and customization of food.

In their call “KBBE.2012.2.3-04: Personalized approaches to food production and distribution” they ask for proposals to research this issue in a consortium of SMEs and Research Institutes.

The aim is to further develop processing, packaging and distribution aspects of convenient, personalized food products attractive to the consumer. Personalization can take many forms, and might refer to individual health or lifestyle aspects and/or address personal preferences regarding quality, portion size or cost, convenience, packaging, taste or pleasure, or it might concern specific target groups.

Interestingly, they clearly say that they WANT MORE THAN known approaches such as nutrigenomics, genotyping and phenotyping; specific nutrients or dietary advice, but demand a real prototype of a customizable food product:

“The conceptual models should be applied to developing prototype foods for a limited segment of the market, preferably in a demonstration unit.”

There are already many interesting initatives in this field in the European Community, driven by great entrepreneurs such as Chocri, MyMuesli, Allmytea, and many others!

More info on this in the meta call, Call: FP7-KBBE-2012-6.

The knowledge triangle - research, education and innovation - is a core factor in European efforts to meet the ambitious Lisbon goals. Numerous programmes, initiatives and support measures are carried out at EU level in support of knowledge. The Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) bundles all research-related EU initiatives together under a common roof playing a crucial role in reaching the goals of growth, competitiveness and employment.

The broad objectives of FP7 have been grouped into four categories: Cooperation, Ideas, People and Capacities. For each type of objective, there is a specific programme corresponding to the main areas of EU research policy. All specific programmes work together to promote and encourage the creation of European poles of (scientific) excellence.

Mass Customization is an important topic within the Seventh Framework Programme, as well. About ten research projects of FP7 focus on topics connected to the idea of mass customization. One of these projects is “Sustainable Mass Customization - Mass Customization for Sustainability” (S-MC-S). The S-MC-S project aims at supporting European manufacturing to adapt to global competitive pressures by developing methods and innovative enabling technologies towards a customer oriented and eco-efficient manufacturing. To this end, S-MC-S vision is to define and research a new production paradigm, Sustainable Mass-Customization, while also presenting Customization as one of the main driving forces behind the future success of Sustainability.

In order to incorporate the consumer goods industry into the MCKN platform, we are presenting the research project SERVIVE today. SERVIVE is an EU funded project within the 7th framework and intends to implement Mass Customization throughout Europe on a wide and large scale. It is resident in the fashion and apparel industry and its main goal is to develop a stable business model including the enhancement of all co-design aspects as well as the testing of a new production model based on decentralized networked SME cells.

Within the project, SERVIVE created the SERVIVE community, which offers a world that wants to be explored: Shop mass customized apparel from different suppliers, have your own profile and show your configured products to friends. You cannot only customize your own products, but you are also able to build up a virtual twin of yourself, have a look at the clothes you desire on your avatar and get advice from experts on your looks.

SERVIVE will support the MCKN platform by providing content as for example papers and postings related to the fashion and apparel industry. You are also very welcome to join the SERVIVE Group on MCKN – explore it!

For further information visit: www.mckn.eu/servive