Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition

By B. Joseph Pine II

Book Overview

MASS CUSTOMIZATION--the trailblazing book that showed companies how to mass-produce and individually customize their products and services--is now available in paperback. New ways of managing, together with new technology, make possible the seeming paradox of providing each customer with the "tailor-made" benefits of the pre-industrial craft system at the low costs of modern mass production. As author Joe Pine makes clear, businesses that learn to embrace mass customization are able to create greater variety and customization in their products and services at competitive prices, or better. This insightful book shows how it's done. Also available in hardcover; ISBN 0875843727, $35.00.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0875849466
• ISBN13: 9780875849461
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Pr
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Fantastic for Internet Entrepreneurs

Fantastic! The fact that this book was written in 1993 is particularly astounding, as its ideas are still cutting edge today. Internet entrepreneurs need to read, re-read, and workshop this book, as it is particularly useful from both a practical and conceptual standpoint in helping companies realize how their business models need to change once they begin to participate in markets where supply is infinite -- an issue that strikes at the core of e-commerce.

useful but a bit oudated

After reading the book, I found a clearer picture about mass customization. Mass customization is now widely used by many businesses, but we may not know how it operates!In this book, it tells you how you should change your business operation to mass customization step by step, also tell you 5 methods to customize your products or services. And these 5 methods are useful and practicable for designing how the business enter the market.The stucture of the book is clear, give a full description on the development of the operation, from mass production to mass customization , and the pros and cons of those two operations, followed with the detail explanation on mass customization.However, I think it's a bit outdated because all the things around us are mass customized and we do not have to decide whether we should change to customized operation or not, but to decide the degree of the customization.

He gets it.

What a refreshing book that is inendated with facts and research, yet the concepts have implementable steps to move your organization into the personalization future. Indeed this author "gets it" when it comes to the individualized services and products that every company should adopt.