Mass-Customization MCPC2009 + EMF & Health Business in Drucker framework

The 5th World Conference on Mass Customization & Personalization (MCPC2009) will be arranged between 4th-8th October 2009 in Helsinki, Finland. This conference gathers together a nice mixture of people (architects, business executives, designers, artists, researchers, etc). What I like in this year's MCPC, is the ability to co-create and customise the actual conference with a toolkit! During the years, I have tried to stay tuned what is happening in this fascinating mass-customization scene [1].

If you are curious about this mass-customisation and personalisation area, I recommend the blog of professor Frank Piller. Frank always has interesting things going on and he is good in telling business stories :-)

My presentation and paper in this year's MCPC2009 Conference is called:

"Sources of Innovative Opportunity and Mass-Customization
 – An Analysis of EMF & Health Business Area"

Abstract (updated): "Systematic innovation means monitoring changes in existing business structures and early entrepreneurs often take risks in entering a new business area. Therefore, the Seven Sources of Innovative Opportunity, an innovation monitoring framework from Peter Drucker is presented. Within this paper we investigate how this framework is related to mass-customization and personalization. First we test this framework in real context by evaluating three health product companies and their innovation activities. These companies operate in a new business area called the EMF (Electro-Magnetic Fields) and Health. Recently, several scientists, governments and the European Parliament have emphasized precautionary principle and indicated health risks in mobile phones, base stations and other technologies. At the same time authorities and standard setting bodies (like ICNIRP, IEEE and WHO) have not officially recognized such risks. This tension provides a starting point for the evaluation. At the end of this paper we discuss how crowdsourcing and mass-customization toolkits could be utilized more effectively by entrepreneurs. Open innovation paradigm and the challenges in knowledge brokering in R&D are also introduced."

Update 4th October  2009:  My paper in PDF format can be found here. The presentation in the MCPC2009 will take place on Tuesday, 6th of October 2009, starting at 13:45.

Update 19th October 2009: An interesting concept was mentioned in the MCPC2009: Continuous Innovation. This happened in Joseph Pine 's presentation:"Future of mass customization". I need to focus on this in the future.

Comments about the paper or about the conference are welcome!