Mass customization research: trends, directions, diffusion intensity, and taxonomic frameworks

Mass customization (MC) as a business strategy is designed to simultaneously compete on two rival competitive priorities—the price and customization level of a product. MC academics and experts have gone a step further. They suggest that MC is a unique strategy whose implementation promises across-the-board improvement in all four of the competitive priorities (price, quality, flexibility, and speed) simultaneously. Its growing adoption by businesses in recent years, the steep rise in success stories associated with MC, and the voluminous body of publications in a short period of its existence have created a need to study the directions, trends, application potential, and research strategies embedded in these publications. Accordingly, this paper studies and analyzes the trends and directions of the research published in 1,124 MC publications that have appeared in journals and magazines since the inception of the term mass customization in 1987 by Stan Davis in his classic book Future Perfect. Statistical trend analyses are conducted to study the vitality and health of the field of MC using number of publications and number of publication outlets and their respective trends. The publication outlet data conform to an S curve, establishing maturity of the MC field. The publication data show that the MC field has passed through four stages of growth: incubation or slow (1987–1992), exponential (1993–2003), stable and matured (2003–2005). There is a slight dip in 2006 in terms of publication outlets; there are, however, confirmatory factors that indicate that the dip in 2006 may be an outlier. This paper also suggests developing a clear understanding of the value and type of research embodied in MC publications through three types of taxonomic analyses. The frameworks for all three taxonomies are set forth, two of which have been previously employed in other areas of OR/MS (Reisman and Kirschnik, Oper Res 42(4):577–588, 1994; Oper Res 43(5):731–740, 1995): The first taxonomic framework first classifies the paper as a theory paper or an application paper. At the second stage, the application content of the publication is determined based on a five-point scale ranging from simple modeling of the real world to bona fide real-world application. The second taxonomic framework suggests usage of a taxonomy comprised of seven distinct types of research strategies. The former analysis provides important information about the application worthiness of the MC publications and hence their usefulness to the real world. The second analysis provides information about the type of research strategies used by MC researchers, which, in turn, allows drawing conclusions about the quality and rigor of such research. The third taxonomic framework suggested recommends classification of all publications among multi-level containers based on the disciplines that intersect with MC and their branches.