The state of the art of the research in mass customization implementation guidelines

Interest for mass customization (MC) is constantly growing in industry and academia. However, a number of failures in adopting MC has been reported. It seems that the academic knowledge accumulated on MC is transferred to practice to a limited extent. MC implementation guidelines is a type of academic research that is specifically designed to transfer this knowledge to practice. However, it is still unclear what MC implementation guidelines characteristics should be. This paper reviews relevant literature in order to identify characteristics of MC implementation guidelines currently available. It also defines directions for the future research on MC implementation guidelines development.