Invented Here

"Each capability?craft, mass production, process enhancement, and mass customization?and its associated market value form a strategic destination. "

"The search for innovative products or services is driving a return to craft in many industries."

"Managers can win with the innovative, tailored solutions of craft."

"Whenever a firm faces a novelty market, craft is the right path."

"Managers should design systems of reward, information, and control that unleash workers' talents."

"Using an appropriate IT system, a firm can count on improved coordination, increased knowledge exchange, and a more cohesive social network for workers."

"The only way to know when craft isn't the answer is to understand craft's disadvantages."

"Mass production is still the most pervasive and arguably the most reliably profitable form of work."

"Mass production work must line up with customer value over time."

"Managing a mass production firm into the next century means thinking foremost about scale."

"Technology for mass production either replaces or directly controls the work."

"The very sources of mass production's advantage?its stability and scale?lead to the problem that mass production adapts poorly to variations in process design. "

"Like craft and mass production before it, process enhancement leverages the learning that takes place along the right path to mass customization and beyond."

"Management has to articulate and codify any new knowledge generated through mass production routines to create continuous gains in organizational performance."

"Integrating production and innovation is critical to adopting information technologies into the fabric of work."

"What many firms call process enhancement simply isn't."

"How can a firm be efficient and low priced and customized and fast at the same time?"

"In a mass customization architecture, the resources, including human capabilities, are arranged as independent capabilities, or modules."

"The lifeblood of mass customization is IT?connecting people, modules of software or information, know-how, and automation into an efficient, flexible, and reconfigurable organizational system. "

"In some markets, novelty, commodity, and quality market positions can create more value than precision."

"We have described the four capabilities as four destinations on a map, with a single route, or "path," between them."

"Changes along the right path occur at a firm's most basic level: its work."

"We propose three actions for ensuring strategic knowledge articulation."

"Linking works by identifying cross-functional processes."

"Once a firm understands how its processes are linked, it can take them apart and put them back together again at will."

"Taking the right path every day offers the firm an ongoing, self-renewing way of working that can yield significant competitive advantage."

"The customer becomes a real partner with the producer."