A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Monica Izvercianu and Sabina Şeran
Figure 3: The first two strategies situated on the base of the prosumer creativity and focus paradigm
Company + Company (customization) Strategy represents the companies’ first response to the
growing desire of consumer individualism in a mass production context, without significant increase in
costs. Consumers have developed a culture of self awareness, and the standardized products weren’t
a suitable option for everyone. Because mass production meant low costs and a fair price to the
consumer, companies had a hard time thinking to give up this procedure and start manufacturing
unique products at excessive prices. In this context, a compromise solution has been found: the
standard product’s customization. Thereby, companies don’t loose their clients due to high costs and
they manage to meet the individualization needs of some of the most demanding of them.
This strategy implies an exclusive focus on the objectives of a certain company which desires to use
its resources as efficient as possible, to sell its products in a large number, to obtain a good profit and
a nice and fresh image. Such a company seems to offer flexibility to its client, but the range of
materials and colours from which the consumer can choose is restricted to a few and allows only a
slightly creative involvement of the part of the prosumer.
The partnership takes place between two companies: between the main company that manufactures
the products or offers the services that can be customized and company number 2, its supplier, which
responds quickly to the different special orders.
This strategy convinced companies from all over the world, from all domains, especially from the
service sector, and from the real and virtual world. Therefore, McDonalds with its fast food restaurants
introduced to the world standard products that the consumer could combine at ease, giving a freedom
of choice, a choice from an existing and pre-defined offer. BMW started to allow customization of its
cars from a large range of colours, interior pieces, materials, functionalities, engine types, totalling
appreciatively 500 possible models of the same car, but the consumer is restricted to those models.
IKEA offers furniture that the consumers can personally assembly or change, by choosing its colour,
cut and dimensions from the materials at disposal. Even the instructions for the assembly are
standardized. Mobile services have different offers that people can customize to suit their needs, and
the companies from the online world allow the personalization of different items from a wide range of
colours and images, but the original product is a standard one.
Company + Prosumer (crowd sourcing) Strategy marks the arising of the prosumer in the production
process. In this case, crowd sourcing can be seen as a business model where the company is
outsourcing certain parts or specific activities that were traditionally realized by its employees or
professionals to its clients or other amateurs. The term has been used with other names like: “wide
audience end-user engagement” (Antikainen and Vaataja, 2010) or “collective customer collaboration”
(Ogawa and Piller, 2006).
In this case, we have a partnership between the producing company and the prosumer. The
partnership implies a close cooperation between two or several parts that have specific
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