Decentralized Creativity: The Case of an Industrial Enterprise Personalizing its Products

By Christophe Lerch, Thierry Burger-Helmchen
English

In this paper, we study a company that combines singularity at the service level with mass production. To some extent, the model in place constitutes an evolution of Toyotism, however, this new organization raises difficult coordination problems due to the creation activities being decentralized within and outside of the company. By using the classifications popularized by Da Silveira, Borenstein, Fogliatto, and Lampel and Mintzberg, we show that the exchange between the workers within and outside the company is key to the improvement of the customization capacity of the company.JEL Code : M10

Keywords

  • creativity
  • kitchen
  • conception process
  • mass customization
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