Our major event of June, the MC2012 in Salzburg, Austria, was a great success. As you can see in my other wrap-up post, we had a tremendous amount of great speakers, presenting the latest and greatest in Mass Customization and Open innovation.
What I did not cover in great detail so far is the business workshop that has been helt by my fellow co-hosts, Dominik Walcher and Paul Blazek as part of the EU AlpineSpace Project ("Open Alps"), coordinated by ITG Salzburg.
Following an introductory overview of the development of MC, Dominik Walcher and Paul Blazek presented to and debated with the attending enthusiasts (the workshop was already fully booked ahead of time):
- Content and results of their latest Delphi-Study "The Future of Mass Customization"
- Long Tail Business in practical application (case studies about Spreadshirt and Lulu)
- Hard MC vs. soft MC
- The MC500 study and the Configurator Database (findings and numerous case studies)
- The 3 most important aspects of successful MC
- Exclusive cases: CowCrowd and Build-A-Bear
- The interaction with the consumer: What makes an MC customer want to pay for your product
- Introduction into Open Innovation
- Lead-User method, toolkits, idea contests and netnography as key-tools for successful OI
- Successful OI business models (cases of Threadless and Quirky)
Following this tightly packed bundle of knowledge, participants were invited to apply the new insights to their very own fields of work in a small-group mentored workshop.
From the feedback we have gotten so far, the business workshop was as much of a success as the conference. We received a lot of positive comments and will be glad to offer workshops like this as open or on-request inhouse events in the future.
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