Current literature argues that firms should have strong ties to customers to benefit from increased customer retention and loyalty. Strong ties, however, have also been shown to prevent innovation, suggesting that firms should also develop weak ties to other customer groups. This paper focuses...

Over the last decade, mass customization has emerged as an effective approach to customer centricity, i.e. to regard customers as individuals, to proactively develop products and services according to the individual customer’s preferences, and to efficiently produce and distribute these...

The idea of mass customization is to turn customers' heterogeneous needs into an opportunity to create value, challenging the “one size fits all” assumption of traditional mass production. In this paper, we explore the characteristics of successful mass customization implementation at the...

The importance of choosing the "right" brand name is well known in literature as well as in practice - at least for mass producers. But while the general phenomenon of mass customization gains more and more attention not only with regard to heterogeneous customers but also within research,...

The objective of this paper is to discuss the impact of social media on customer co-creation in the innovation process. Customer co-creation denotes an active, creative and social collaboration process between producers and customers (users), facilitated by a company, in the context of new...

Customer co-creation denotes an active, creative and social collaboration process between producers (retailers) and customers (users), facilitated by the company. Customers become active participants in an open innovation process of a firm and take part in the development of new products or...

Threadless’ product is rather simple: A graphic t-shirt. But the company has become one of textbook examples and pioneers of customer co-creation – open innovation with customers. The Chicago-based start-up, founded in 2001, created a unique infrastructure for deep involvement of customers...

Industrie 4.0 (I40), i.e. the implementation of cyber-physical systems along the entire value chain and a far reaching digitalization of products and processes, is regarded as a significant agent of change in our current industrial system. While the previous discussion of I40 has been centered...

Netnography i.e. the systematic observation and analysis of online communities to generate insights for an innovation process, has been established as a method of user innovation in consumer goods industries. In this study we apply this technique for the first time in the context of a complex,...