Mass customization (MC) toolkits (von Hippel and Katz, 1998; von Hippel 2005) have gained a lot of attention among scientists during the last couple of years. A Google.Scholar search for the term “Toolkits for User Innovation and Design” today yields some 28.000 results. The high interest in MC toolkits is ingrained in their importance to modern mass customization strategies (Salvador et al. 2009). Only if MC toolkits assist their users effectively during the self-design process, they will master and enjoy the customization process and manage to come-up with products that really fit their needs. A positive process utility as well as a high preference fit has been shown to increase the willingness to pay for self-designed products, i.e. the value that can be extracted from mass customization strategies (Dellaert and Stremersch 2005; Franke et al. 2008; Franke et al. 2009; Franke and Schreier 2010). Thus, a growing body of literature is dealing with the question(s) of how customers approach self-design tasks and how MC toolkits should be designed in order to make them effective problem solving assistants.
The goal of this research project is to systematically summarize and synthesize literature that sheds light on the design of MC toolkits. The contribution of this paper is twofold: First, we map the relevant findings of current literature from three disciplines (marketing, information systems, and technology and innovation management) and identify robust insights as well as contradictions. Second, we derive theoretically sound and empirically proofed suggestions and recommendations for the design of MC toolkits in order to make them effective problem solving assistants.
To answer our research questions, we will conduct a systematic literature review. The corpus of research will be extracted from a total of approx. 190 scientific journals ranked A, B, or C in the JOURQUAL3 journal ranking*. We will only consider papers published in English after 1990 since mass customization first appeared around 1993 in Pine`s “Mass customization: the new frontier in business competition”. The authors will manually review the titles and abstracts of all publications that relate to any of the specified keywords. The selected articles will be reviewed independently and examined according to their relevance for the research at hand.
EXPECTED PROGRESS BY 08/2016: By August 2016 we expect to have completed the systematic literature review. This means that we plan to be able to present the results of our efforts to map the field at the conference. We would like to present the best practice approach at that point of time.
* JOURQUAL3 is a ranking of journals relevant to business research based on evaluations by the members of VHB, the German Academic Association for Business Research.
REFERENCES:
Dellaert, Benedict GC, and Stefan Stremersch. "Marketing mass-customized products: Striking a balance between utility and complexity." Journal of Marketing Research 42.2 (2005): 219-227.
Franke, Nikolaus, and Martin Schreier. "Why Customers Value Self‐Designed Products: The Importance of Process Effort and Enjoyment*." Journal of Product Innovation Management 27.7 (2010): 1020-1031.
Franke, Nikolaus, Peter Keinz, and Martin Schreier. "Complementing Mass Customization Toolkits with User Communities: How Peer Input Improves Customer Self‐Design*." Journal of product innovation management 25.6 (2008): 546-559.
Franke, Nikolaus, Peter Keinz, and Christoph J. Steger. "Testing the value of customization: when do customers really prefer products tailored to their preferences?." Journal of Marketing 73.5 (2009): 103-121.
Salvador, Fabrizio, Pablo Martin De Holan, and Frank T. Piller. "Cracking the code of mass customization." MIT Sloan management review 50.3 (2009): 71.
Von Hippel, Eric. "Democratizing innovation: The evolving phenomenon of user innovation." Journal für Betriebswirtschaft 55.1 (2005): 63-78.
Von Hippel, Eric, and Ralph Katz. "Shifting innovation to users via toolkits." Management science 48.7 (2002): 821-833.
