Product Development and Customization

Delivering products tailored to individual customers without incurring the costs of one-off manufacturing is one of the central tensions in modern product development. Researchers study how firms structure their product architectures—particularly through modularity and platform-based design—to manage the combinatorial explosion of variants while keeping supply chains and development processes tractable. The Design Structure Matrix has become a key analytical tool for mapping dependencies within complex products and predicting how a change in one component ripples through others. Open questions include how deeply customers can be integrated into the design process before complexity overwhelms efficiency gains, and how postponement strategies should be tuned as demand patterns and supply chain configurations continue to shift.

Works

33,515

Total citations

362,628

Keywords

Mass CustomizationProduct ModularityDesign Structure MatrixComplex Product DevelopmentSupply Chain ManagementPlatform-Based Product Development