Via the P2P Foundation blog, I recently read an article entitled The Tranformation of Manufacturing in the 21st Century, written by Lawerence J. Rhoades of Ex One, a developer and supplier of innovative manufacturing technology and equipment in Pennsylvania, USA. It is an excellent and comprehensive article detailing the nature of desktop manufacturing and how [...]

Erick Schonfeld, editor-at-large of Business 2.0 magazine and presenter of The New Disruptors on CNNMoney , recently visited a startup called Desktop Factory. This company is involved in developing 3D printing hardware, and aims to bring their product within financial reach of home users within a few years. The most interesting aspect of Desktop Factory’s [...]

Back in November 2006, I speculated as to the type of businesses which might emerge using a hybrid of mass customization, crowdsourcing, micro manufacturing and online factory business models. One such hybrid has emerged recently in New Zealand. Ponoko describes itself as the world’s first personal manufacturing platform where anyone can click to make, buy [...]

Business Week’s SmallBiz section carries a feature on five small businesses that have implemented mass customization. The five are American Art Resources, Chip-N-Dough, Zyrra, Choiceshirts, and Name Maker. The most interesting general trend from the article is that several of the interviewees refer to the fact that they had to develop proprietary technologies themselves to [...]

Internet custom products marketplace company Zazzle recently announced that it had acquired Confego, a San Francisco Bay Area company that provides software that enables brands to offer fully customized apparel, bags and footwear designed from the ground up. Confego co-founders Brennan Mulligan and David Gross have joined Zazzle effective immediately. Confego manages order fulfillment and [...]

Slacker, Inc. has recently announced the creation of “Personal Radio,” which enables U.S. consumers to customize their own radio stations and listen to them wherever they happen to be. The Slacker Personal Radio is available in beta for PC streaming at www.slacker.com and later this year on Slacker Portable Radio Players via Wi-Fi and Slacker [...]

The ARTIVIDUUM fashion label recently has recently opened a store in Frankfurt, the German metropolis on the Main river. In February 2007, owner Verica Hauch opened the doors to her new store. She opted exclusively for tailored and, more interestingly from this website’s perspective, mass-produced customized clothing. She uses the slogan “Be your own designer”, [...]

In July, 2001 Gale International negotiated a joint venture agreement with POSCO E&C (Korea’s largest engineering and construction company) and the City of Incheon, South Korea, for the planned development of a completely new city, called Songdo City. Located at the site of General MacArthur’s 1950 landing, Songdo will be the first “new” city in [...]

Just how big is the market for photo personalized goods?  A few years ago, it was very unusual to see products that had been personalized with photographs.  Now, it is commonplace with a large selection of online suppliers and also offline stores in shopping districts having the equipment to put photo images on a variety [...]

Kerry and Bryce Moore. Designers and owners of Context Furniture in Royal Oak, Michigan, USA, have written a guest article in Metromode, an online magazine based in Michigan.  In the article (written as a series of posts over a week in February), they explain how their company has utilised mass customization and manufacture on demand [...]

A few developments have taken place in the Nordic countries recently that seem to suggest a more advanced enthusiasm for and understanding of user-centred innovation. Previously, I wrote about how the Danish government has become the first in the world to establish as a national priority, in the words of a government policy statement, “strengthening [...]

Business Week has written about Dell’s new IdeaStorm initiative, suggesting that feels a lot like Digg.com, the popular tech news aggregator.  The similarities are strong:  users of IdeaStorm post suggestions and the community votes, so that the most popular ideas rise to the top. The writers of the Business Week Article are Don Tapscott and [...]

Materialise NV, which develops software for the rapid prototyping and manufacturing (RP&M) industry, and Dimension, a business unit of Stratasys, Inc., have teamed up to develop ‘Dimension Magics’, a customised version of Materialise’ Magics software specially tuned to the specific requirements of production on Dimension 3D printers. Dimension desktop 3D printers – which include the [...]

TDCI and Infor have finalized an OEM agreement whereby Infor will provide TDCI‘s BuyDesign Configurator as an integrated component of Infor ERP SyteLine, Infor ERP Sxe and Infor eStorefront. Infor will offer the integrated component through the company’s direct sales force and partner network. TDCI will also sell extended BuyDesign applications to the Infor customer [...]

Auto Express, a British car magazine, reports in a short news item that BMW are: “…working on a design for a super-efficient factory that can make bespoke cars in five days, instead of the current wait of up to six weeks. But there’s one hitch – it could be eight years before the “fully flexible” [...]