Overcoming Mass Confusion: Collaborative Customer Co-Design in Online Communities

The idea of integrating users into a co-design process as part of a mass customization strategy is a promising approach for companies being forced to react to the growing individualization of demand. Compared to the rather huge amount of literature on manufacturing and information systems for mass customization, only little research discusses the role of the customer within the co-design process. Customers face new uncertainties and risks, coined “mass confusion” in this paper, when acting as co-designers. Building on a construction strategy of empirical management research in the form of six case studies, we propose the use of online communities for collaborative customer co-design in order to reduce the mass confusion phenomenon. In doing so, the paper challenges the assumption made by most mass customization researchers that offering customized products requires an individual (one-to-one) relationship between customer and supplier. The objective of the paper is to build and explore the idea of communities for customer co-design and transfer established knowledge on community support to this new area of application. Acknowledgments: This research was funded partly by grants from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (bmbf) within the projects Ewomacs and WinServ.