Solution space development

General desciption:

A mass customizer must first identify the idisyncratic needs of its customers, specifically the product attributes along which customer needs diverge the most. (This is in great contrast to a mass producer, which must focus on serving universal needs that are ideally shared by all target customers.) Once that information is known and understood, a business can define its “solution space,” clearly delineating what it will offer and what it will not. Obviously, correlating heterogeneous customer needs with differentiated product attributes, validating product concepts and collecting customer feedback can be costly and complex, but several approaches can help. The first is to provide customers with a software design tool like a CAD system but with an easy-to-use interface and a library of basic modules and functionalities. Using so-called innovation tool kits, customers can by themselves translate their preferances directly into a product design, highlighting unsatisfied needs during the process. The resulting information can then be evaluated and potentially incorporated by the company into its solution space. After a company has collected dataabout its customers’ needs, it has to interpret and render that information I nthe form of product concepts that customers can then review. But the sheer number of prototype variants that might be generated can make the process  daunting. Consequently, some companies have implemented an approach called “virtual concept testing” (Dahan, E. & Hauser, J. R., 2002). In developing a solution space, companies should consider incorporating data not just from current and potential customers but also from those who have taken their business elsewhere. Consider, for example, information about products that have been evaluated but not ordered. Such data can be obtained from log files generated by the browsing behavior of people using online configurators. By systematically analyting that information, managers can learn much about customer preferences, ultimately leading to a refined solution space. A company could, for instance, eliminate options that are rarely explored or selected, and it could add more choices for the popular components. In addition, customer feedback can even be used to improve the very algorithms that a particular application deploys (Salvador, F. et al., 2009).

References:

Dahen, E. & Hauser, J. R., 2002, The Virtual Customer, Journal of Product Innovation Management 19 no. 5, p.332-353

Salvador, F. et al., 2009, Cracking the Code of Mass Customization, MIT Sloan Management Review. 50 (3), 71-78.