Leading Mass Customization and Personalization from Emerging Stage to a Mainstream Business Model

Mass Customization and Personalization (MCP) aims to provide goods and services that best serve individual customers' personal needs with near mass production efficiency.

MCP is a growing field of interest for practitioners and researchers alike. Approaching more than a decade of development, it is now beginning to emerge in some selected applications as a profitable business model. These best practices in MCP are rapidly gaining broad attention by managers, who transfer and apply them to all kinds of businesses and industries. At the same time, the academic effort undertaken by researchers of various disciplines to enhance the theoretical foundations in the field of MCP is constantly increasing.

The MCP Congress in 2003 is the second large scale international event of its kind and especially organized to approach the field of MCP. Following the example of the First MCP Congress in 2001, which was held in Hong Kong with almost 200 participants from 15 countries, the MCP'03 Congress will take a broad and interdisciplinary perspective to the topics. Conference Venue is the Technische Universität München (TUM).

The interdisciplinary approach comprises the perspectives of management and economics, engineering, design and information technology from an academic as well as a practitioners' perspective. We also invite experts from sociology, consumer psychology, anthropology or arts to participate and contribute to this event.

We will again establish practitioners' sessions and a pre-conference business workshop for those who want an intense introduction into the topic, taught by a known expert of the field. As a promising new feature, the MCP'03 Congress will host a Pre-conference Research Consortium for doctoral students.

Therefore, the conference is a unique opportunity for individuals from both the academic and practitioner worlds to interact and discuss the most recent progress and cutting edge innovations.