The 2015 World Conference on Mass Customization, Personalization and Co-Creation (MCPC) takes place in Montreal from October, 20th to October, 22nd. This annual conference brings together academics, business leaders and consultants and offers an intensive program like workshops, discussion panels and paper presentations.
Our scientific partner Professor Frank Piller will hold a keynote about „Complexity as an Innovation Driver: Profiting from Mass Customization“ and Sebastien Ebacher (Producer at Ubisoft Montréal) is giving an insight into „Gameception: A proposition on managing the creative process on AAA video game production“.
We are happy that Paul Blažek is representing cyLEDGE with our latest paper „The Evolutionary Process of Product Configurators. An Analysis of Product Configurators in the Automotive Industry“. The focus of the paper is to examine whether or not there is a development in terms of newly launched, existing and removed product configurators over the last three years.
As seen in the figure below, the biggest growth in the number of product configurators is in the Automotive & Vehicle industry, whereas products in the Electronic & Media as well as Beauty & Health industry declined (2013 n=900, 2014 n=970, 2015 n= 1034, source: www.configurator-database.com).
The analysis detects that there is an overall growth of web based B2C product configurators in nearly all industries which are listed in the Configurator Database. Taking a closer look at the automotive industry from 2013 to 2015 reveals that there is an evolutionary process of the configurators’ user interfaces. The analyzed 33 car configurators changed their focus to improved and bigger product visualization as well as a better structure of the interaction steps. This may lead to a perceived reduction of complexity in the configuration process and improve the overall usability. To summarize, companies of the automotive industry constantly develop their product configurators to keep up with the state of technology and the changing media affinities of their customers.