Abstract
Researchers of the Mass Customization domain face not only challenges of proper and timeless identification of latest practical trends, but also difficulties in rational analyses on the numerous existing scientific studies in this field as well as a need for a comprehensive and multidimensional state-of-the-art overview of the Mass Customization research domain in the last three decades. Therefore, the present research article aims to provide a critical standpoint and reveal the main research directions and content at systemic, bibliometric and historical research levels in the period of 1990–2020. Four types of bibliometric clustering techniques and a visualization of results in a format of two-dimensional maps by the VOSviewer software were applied in the analysis on 1783 scientific papers from the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Core Collection. The analysis reveals six historical periods in the Mass Customization research domain, from which, in the last three decades, three are identified as influencing modern Mass Customization research areas and objects. Results confirmed a shift from a stand-alone scientific approach to the customization of tangible products in the manufacturing field and their risk management, to a hybrid scientific approach with a focus on the customization of non-tangible products and personalized customer behavior in online environments.
Highlights
Mass Customization is primarily recognized as a differentiation strategy in the manufacturing and retail spheres that provides a wide range of customized products or services as well as co-design or other value co-creation options, which are attainable for large market segments by keeping operational costs near to a mass production level
From 2010 up until now, the focus has been switched to a synergy of interrelated scientific domains, which together with trends of globalization, digitalization and sustainability have become the main drivers in MC research and resulted in a number of new concept versions like Smart Customization, Agile Mass Customization and Electronic Mass Customization and Personalisation (e-MCP) (Medini et al 2015; Hora et al 2016; Hu et al 2011; Grosso and Forza 2019; Zhang et al 2019)
The systemic and bibliometric analysis on the MC research domain in 1990–2020 supports the above defined findings by showing that there are three MC sub-domains identified throughout the scientific research
Summary
Mass Customization (further MC) is primarily recognized as a differentiation strategy in the manufacturing and retail spheres that provides a wide range of customized products or services as well as co-design or other value co-creation options, which are attainable for large market segments by keeping operational costs near to a mass production level. In late 2000s and mostly in the whole of the past decade, an intensive application of combined technology and management solutions, digital society and business transformations have shifted the orientation of the concept more towards intangible products’ management, customer involvement and mutual value creation via platforms and tools in an online environment (Baranauskas 2020; Raišieneand Baranauskas 2018) These practical tendencies do illustrate different MC domain transformation periods, and undoubtedly appear as the root cause for three theoretical research subdomain areas, their topics and gaps. These areas and periods replaced research gaps or in some cases overlaped with the first decade’s (approx. from 1987 to the beginning of 2000s) research interests in the traditional MC, including such topics as a transition from Mass Production, and an analysis of technological, economic, market specific trends and critical success factors for MC implementation in the manufacturing field (Pin et al 1993; Gilmore et al 1997; Schubert and Ginsburg 2000; McCarthy 2004)
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