Customization 4.0

This proceedings volume presents the latest research from the worldwide mass customization & personalization (MCP) community bringing together new thoughts and results from various disciplines within the field. The chapters are based on papers from the MCPC 2017. The book showcases research and practice from authors that see MCP as an opportunity to extend or even revolutionize current business models. The current trends of Industrie 4.0, digital manufacturing, and the rise of smart products allow for a fresh perspective on MCP: Customization 4.0. The book places a new set of values in the centre of the debate: a world with finite resources, global population growth, and exacerbating climate change needs smart thinking to engage the most effective capabilities and resources. It discusses how Customization 4.0 fosters sustainable development and creates shared value for companies, customers, consumers, and the society as a whole. The chapters of this book are contributed by a wide range of specialists, offering cutting-edge research, as well as insightful advances in industrial practice in key areas.

The MCPC 2017 has a strong focus on real life MCP applications, and this proceedings volume reflects this. MCP strategies aim to profit from the fact that people are different. Their objective is to turn customer heterogeneities into opportunities, hence addressing “long tail” business models. The objective of MCP is to provide goods and services that best serve individual customers’ needs with near mass production efficiency. This proceedings volume highlights the interdisciplinary work of thought leaders, technology developers, and researchers with corporate entrepreneurs putting these strategies into practice.

Chapter 24 is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

Stephan Hankammer is a research associate at the Technology and Innovation Management Group at RWTH Aachen University since 2014. He conducts research on ecologically sustainable business models, collaborative value creation, and sustainable consumption. He has been coordinator of a European ECO INNOVERA research project on sustainable mass customization in the consumer electronics industry. Moreover, he has worked on larger mass customization projects in several other industries in both B2C and B2B settings. His field of expertise is sustainable collaborative value creation and he is an enthusiastic interdisciplinary scientist interested in combining different research topics related to sustainable management, innovation management, and business ethics.

Kjeld Nielsen is an Associate Professor for the Department of Materials and Production at Aalborg University. Kjeld Nielsen is head of the Mass Customization Research Group. His research interests include mass customization, product configuration, reconfigurable manufacturing systems, and product architecture.

Frank T. Piller has headed the Technology and Innovation Management Group at RWTH Aachen University since 2007. Earlier, he worked at the MIT Sloan School of Management and was an assistant professor of management at the TUM Business School (1999-2004). Frank Piller graduated with a Ph.D. in operations management from the University of Würzburg in 1999. His post-doctoral Habilitation degree is from the TUM Business School. Frank Piller has worked as a consultant and delivered executive workshops for many international companies, including several DAX30 and Fortune 500 corporations. As a member of their board of directors or board of scientific advisors, he works with a number of innovative technology companies to bring his research into practice. His current research focuses on the need of established corporations to cope with the challenge of digital transformation and similar disruptive technological innovations. This includes a growing stream of research on digital business models and the systematic design of platform-based business ecosystems, but also research on Leadership for Industrie 4.0 and the establishment of organizational structures and cultures that allow for change. He is the Chairman of a cross-industry group hosted by VDI (Verein Deutsche Ingenieure) to develop standards in the field of platform-based digital business models ("Fachausschuss Geschäftsmodelle für Industrie 4.0").

Günther Schuh is a German engineer and has held the Chair for Production Systems at the RWTH Aachen since 2002. He is also Director of the Research Institute for Rationalization , a member of the Board of Directors of the Machine Tool Laboratory (WZL) of RWTH Aachen University and the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology (IPT). A further academic task is the management of RWTH Aachen Campus GmbH. Since 2004, he hasalso been on the directorate of the Research Institute for Operations Management (FIR) at the RWTH. From 2008 to 2012 he was Vice-President for Industry and Economics of RWTH Aachen University. Prof. Schuh has additionally worked in several supervising and management boards.

Ning Wang is a research associate at the Technology and Innovation Management Group at the RWTH Aachen University since 2014. She conducts research in the area of mass customization & personalization, consumer co-creation and user toolkits design. Her research tries to extend the conventional mass customization and personalization understanding from a new perspective: smart products for customized product-services beyond the point of sales. She has been working on research projects of cross-cultural toolkits development for online customization, design parameters of the smart product-service system (Smart PSS) and how to achieve user satisfied customization and data-driven service personalization via a new form of smart product and user interaction design.