Solution Space Development for Mass Customization

Mass Customization is a strategic approach that aims at exploiting heterogeneous markets by creating high-variety product offerings that enable customers to find products that meet their individual needs. However, implementing such a business model requires companies to acquire the strategic capability of solution space development: a firm's ability to identify the drivers of product variety in a product domain and conceptualize a respective high-variety product offering. Surprisingly, this product management task has rather been neglected in current management literature. In order to address this gap in existing research, this dissertation investigates the phenomenon of solutions space development for mass customization in detail. The study adds to existing research by developing a theoretical framework for solution space development and deriving a catalog of managerial activities, methods and tools that can be applied in this context. Therefore, a broad list of managerial activities and organizational mechanisms is suggested and linked to a set of essential tasks of solution space development, which have been defined through prior analysis. Beyond this analysis of the strategic capability of solution space development for mass customization, this dissertation develops formative measurement indices for all three strategic capabilities of mass customization. The resulting measurement tool carries important managerial implications, as it enables practitioners to benchmark their company's mass customization performance against the performance of potential competitors. Thus, the benchmarking tool helps practitioners to identify specific activities that must be implemented and resources that need to be acquired in order to improve a firm´s mass customization strategy.