Openness and Open-Endedness: Implications for Mass Customization Capabilities

Mass customization (MC) firms have tackled the customization-responsiveness squeeze by designing modular product architectures that address a chosen set of customer needs, and developing corresponding internal capabilities to efficiently deliver customized product individuals derived from the architecture. As these are costly and complex endeavors, MC firms have fixed the architecture in terms of its scope and contents for a period of time to be able to recoup the costs from developing it, and typically kept the delivery capabilities internal to avoid adding complexity from organizational handovers. Further, the product individuals have been considered mostly ‘final and fixed’, with little to no customization after initial delivery. Recent trends of servitization, digitalization, and open platform economy all challenge presumptions that underlie the rationale of this approach taken by MC firms. The trends act as drivers for the scope and contents of product architecture, as well as delivered product individuals, to become more malleable, continuously changing, evolvable, unbounded and therefore open-ended. Moreover, the trends drive developments where tasks in design, production, and delivery may be moved outside the focal firm to external 3rd parties, customers, or users. This in effect opens the firm. This paper conducts a conceptual theory adaptation study of the implications of openness and open-endedness for MC firms and their key capabilities.