Mass Customization and Customer Centricity

This book honors the contributions and career of Cipriano Forza, Professor of Management Engineering at the University of Padova, Italy. He is a Member of the Scientific Committee of Academic Journal Guide (ABS), an Associate Editor of the Decision Sciences Journal and a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Operations Management, where he curated a special issue on “Coordinating Product Design, Process Design, and Supply Chain Design Decisions”. As one of the world’s foremost researchers in the area of mass customization and operations management, Prof. Forza published more than 200 scientific articles with over 10,000 citations on Google Scholar. For his groundbreaking work, he received several awards, including the Dr. Theo Williamson Award for Excellence (1997), best paper awards by Production Planning and Control (2005) and the Journal of Operations Management (2006), the Harry Boer Highly Commended Award (2016), and the EurOMA Fellowship Awards (2021).

Leading researchers and practitioners that have been working with the honoree contributed a broad range of findings from conceptual and empirical research about mass customization and personalization to this book. The individual chapters take a customer centric view on the challenges and opportunities of product and service customization from an operations management, information technology, entrepreneurship, marketing, and organizational perspective. The authors explore key ideas, current developments as well as future research directions.

Thomas Aichner is an Associate Professor of Marketing who held academic positions at leading Universities and Business Schools in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Saudi Arabia. He received a joint Ph.D. in Management Engineering from the University of Padova (Vicenza, Italy) and a Dr. rer. pol. in Business Administration from ESCP Business School (Berlin, Germany), with the special mention of Doctor Europaeus. His research is focused on country of origin, mass customization, digital management, and disability/inclusion.

Fabrizio Salvador is Professor of Operations Management and Vice-Rector for Applied Research at IE University (Madrid, Spain). Dr. Salvador holds a Ph.D. in Operations Management and MS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Padova (Vicenza, Italy). He has been visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Faculty Research Associate at Arizona State University. His award-winning research is published in various top journals, where he has also held multiple editorial leadership positions. He has received the prestigious Thinkers50 Radar award as a leading management scholar.