International
Institute on Mass Customization & Personalization
(iimcp.org)
A home for mass customization? On 7 October 2003, the IIMCP was inaugurated during the first conference day of the MCPC 2003 and celebrated at the official conference dinner. What is the IIMCP (despite a rather complicated acronym)?
The "International Institute on Mass Customization and Personalization" (IIMCP or short: MCP institute) is a society to provide a platform for interaction between researchers and practitioners on mass customization, personalization and related issues.
For all non academics: In the academic world, most conferences, many journals, and also large research programs are endorsed, organized, or edited by a society. These are networks of people from (often) different disciplines and institutions with a common theme or topic. A new society is founded when a group of people feel that there is a need for it, that a specific topic is either not represented well within existing communities or if it gets such a drive and development that a new community of persons interested in the topic derives.
The latter is exactly the motivation behind founding the MCP institute. Mass Customization and Personalization are both very unique common themes. They draw attention and input of professionals from different disciplines like marketing, architecture, industrial design operations management, product design, industrial engineering, manufacturing, sales, supply chain management, ergonomics, and economics. Also, MCP cut across different industries. These two aspects -- interdisciplinary and cross-industry application -- are very unique compared to many other topics and societies. Here we see the main differentiator of the IIMCP.
The three main purposes of the IIMCP are
- to promote and develop MCP technologies and business models,
- to nurture collaboration among members, especially in between academia
and industry, and
- to provide a communication medium for sharing latest developments in the field of MCP.
These objectives shall be reached by different means: the biannual MCP World Congress, special interest conferences on special topics or within a regional context, workshops on MCP technologies and approaches, a newsletter, a web site, and an (academic) journal.
Every MCPC participant becomes a member of the society. If you does not belong to this group and want to join as well, please just drop us a note!
Frank
Piller and Mitchell Tseng
(Founding Directors of the IIMCP)
Initiators of the IIMCP:
 |
Departement
of Information, Organization and Management, TUM Business School |
 |
 |
|
More
information on mass customization |
The MCPC is the largest international series of conference in the field of mass customization, customerintegration, and personalization. The conference is held biannually, and participants come from academia, businesses, and consultancies (ratio: 50:40:10). The MCPC proceedings are a comprehensive source of reference from an interdisciplinary view.
|
The
International Journal of Mass Customization (IJMassC), Imderscience,
published since 2005 in cooperation with the IIMCP
Finally: Mass Customization has its own journal. After
almost two years of planning, the first issue has just been
published. Contribute with your ideas, papers, research and
insights, and put the journal on your regular reading list
by subscribing it or recommending it to your library. More
information
The Customer Centric Enterprise: Advances in Mass Customization and
Personalization, edited by Mitchell M. Tseng and Frank T. Piller,
Springer New York / Berlin 2003
Despite a few exceptions, literature about mass customization and personalization is dominated by an argumentation focusing on the benefits of these strategies, but not delivering concepts and implementation steps how to build a customer centric enterprise. The book provides insight into these particular aspects. Following an interdisciplinary approach, leading scientists and practitioners in the field share their concepts and strategies for building a customer centric enterprise from the perspective of design, production engineering, technology and innovation management, customer behavior, as well as marketing.