Mass-customization enablers and capability: a comparative analysis of implementation guidelines and theory-testing research findings

Abstract

Building Mass-Customization Capability (MCC) is becoming an imperative for a growing number of manufacturers. Both the research stream that develops guidelines to assist practitioners in this endeavor and the one that tests the effectiveness of posited enablers of MCC contribute to the understanding of how to build MCC. However, these two streams have remained surprisingly unrelated. To bridge the gap between them, the present study pursues a threefold objective. First, it extends the latest systematic review of the literature on masscustomization implementation guidelines, finding incipient attention to organizational and inter-organizational factors, besides technological enablers, and to mutual interdependencies among enablers, besides precedence relationships, but an empirical base that remains very limited. Second, it systematically reviews, for the first time, theory-testing research on the enablers. of MCC, finding a broad set of supported antecedents, including many organizational and inter-organizational factors, but relatively few relationships among them, besides other theoretical and empirical limitations. Finally, it conceptually compares the results of these two literature reviews, deriving a more comprehensive picture of what we already know about how to build MCC and identifying several directions for advancing this body of knowledge in the short, mid, and long term.

Article history: Received (September 3, 2025); Revised (July 9, 2026); Accepted (August 26, 2026); Published online (October 23, 2026)