This book honors the contributions and career of Cipriano Forza, Professor of Management Engineering at the University of Padova, Italy. He is a Member of the Scientific Committee of Academic Journal Guide (ABS), an Associate Editor of the Decision Sciences Journal and a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Operations Management, where he curated a special issue on “Coordinating Product Design, Process Design, and Supply Chain Design Decisions”. As one of the world’s foremost researchers in the area of mass customization and operations management, Prof. Forza published more than 200 scientific articles with over 10,000 citations on Google Scholar. For his groundbreaking work, he received several awards, including the Dr. Theo Williamson Award for Excellence (1997), best paper awards by Production Planning and Control (2005) and the Journal of Operations Management (2006), the Harry Boer Highly Commended Award (2016), and the EurOMA Fellowship Awards (2021). Leading researchers and practitioners that have been working with the honoree contributed a broad range of findings from conceptual and empirical research about mass customization and personalization to this book. The individual chapters take a customer centric view on the challenges and opportunities of product and service customization from an operations management, information technology, entrepreneurship, marketing, and organizational perspective. The authors explore key ideas, current developments as well as future research directions.

Mass Customization excites both Researchers and Practitioners because of the possibility to produce customized products with mass production efficiency. Mass Customization - An Exploration of European Characteristics gives an overview on the need for personalisation from a customer perspective, analyses Mass Customization theories and assesses relevant best practices of European and International markets. The results of a survey among more than 500 European customers show a declining willingness of customers to compromise on the issue of suitability of products to their personal needs and preferences, the possibility for companies to break brand loyalty and the influence of immediate availability, delivery time and price to the customer's willingness to take part in the co-creation process.

Mass Customization has become important to business because of the difficulties of customers to find what they want despite an increase in product variety for many products over the past decades. The emergence of modern technologies in production and communication, however, allows companies to produce customized products without relinquishing economies of scale. With only few companies having taken this promising path, the authors believe that Mass Customization and Mass Customization related marketing strategies will play an essential role in the future and prompt both market leaders and their competitors to offer customization on a large scale for a vast variety of products.

"

Die Autoren untersuchen in diesem essential, welche Rolle Virtual Reality zukunftig im Tourismus spielen wird. Zu diesem Zweck vergleichen sie die beiden verwandten Technologien Virtual Reality und Augmented Reality miteinander und beschreiben aktuelle Anwendungsbereiche im Tourismus. Anschliessend werden 18 Prognosen - basierend auf politischen, oekonomischen, soziokulturellen und technologische Faktoren - entwickelt, um die Frage zu beantworten, wie Virtual Reality die Auswahlentscheidung einer Tourismusdestination im Jahr 2025 beeinflussen wird. Um das wahrscheinlichste Zukunftsszenario zu finden, bewerten Experten die Prognosen im Rahmen einer Online-Delphi-Studie.