Customer interaction and digitizability - A structural approach to mass customization

Enterprises in all branches of industry are being forced to react to the growing individualization of demand, yet, at the same time, increasing competitive pressure dictates that costs must also continue to decrease. Companies have to adopt strategies which embrace both a closer reaction to the customers' needs and efficiency. Mass Customization meets this challenge by offering individually customized goods and services at mass production efficiency. However, while Mass Customization has already been discussed in the literature for more than a decade, increased practical implementation of this strategy can been found in business only within the last years. This time lag may be explained by the fact that only since few years sufficient technologies exist to handle the information flows connected with mass customization. Especially as mass customization enters more and more consumer markets, new Internet technologies can be seen as its main enabler. To connect strategies discussed in e-business with the field of mass customization, the paper deploys a structural approach to create mass customized concepts within electronic business.