Next on the horizon is 4D printing, an emerging technology that would allow managers to meet supply chain challenges with customized, adaptive, and potentially self-modulating equipment. Manufacturers should start considering how their infrastructure and supply chains might benefit from this technology as it unfolds.

Throughout the 20th century, autos and the auto industry propelled human development, bringing unrivalled utility and flexibility to the way people move. Yet the industry now faces fundamental disruption as vehicle ownership yields to on-demand mobility.

Thanks to emerging technologies like 3-D printing, manufacturers can offer consumers customized products and do so with unprecedented speed. Intrigued by a new product you saw in a YouTube video? Well, someday soon you may be able to personalize it, order it via the company’s website, and have it in your hands in a matter of days. But to enable this phenomenon at scale, an entirely new model of supply chain is required.

IHG is gaining a competitive advantage from applying advanced analytics to pricing and marketing. “Addressing complexity, if you can address complexity in modern marketing, gives companies a competitive advantage that can take time for competitors to replicate,” say IHG executives Larry Seligman, Jim Sprigg, Angela Galeziowski, and Dev Koushik, in a group interview.

With the help of third-party developers, customization is shifting from the producer to the customer. While Industrial Age customization did enhance options for different customer preferences, those options were hardwired into a firm’s supply chain in ways that preserved efficient scale. Customers could choose only from those options that a firm had already programmed to deliver through established supply chains. Digital Age customization allows customers options outside the boundaries of a firm’s traditional supply chain.

The holy grail of medicine is therapy that is customized for the patient. But to get there, health care researchers need huge amounts of data to help identify which genes affect health. The Million Veteran Program has tapped one of the largest cohorts available — U.S. military personnel — to obtain the dataset, but managing the security of this sensitive data is a challenge. In a Q&A, two of the project’s lead scientists, J. Michael Gaziano and Saiju Pyarajan, explain the process.

Few new technologies receive more intense interest than 3-D printing, with some predicting that it will revolutionize manufacturing. That promise remains emergent. But it is taking shape in some industries, such as shoes. The shoe company New Balance thinks that within five years it will custom-make shoes with 3-D printers. And there are already entrepreneurial fashion designers trying to leverage 3-D printing to build up their presence in the market.

3-D printing is the printing of solid, physical 3-D objects. “Just as the Web democratized innovation in bits, a new class of ‘rapid prototyping’ technologies…is democratizing innovation in atoms,” Wired magazine’s longtime editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, stated in “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.” Indeed, open-source 3-D printing fits in with the general trend of open-source innovation by collaborative online communities. The big question: How should existing companies respond?

In industrial sectors such as consulting, advertising, filmmaking, software, architecture, engineering and construction, most individual businesses, by definition, are “project-based firms.” This article proposes the term “baronies” to describe the organizational units that direct the projects within project-based firms, and highlights the roles that barons play in three basic types of project-based firms: dominions, tight federations and loose federations.

PwC has perfected the art of content manipulation: turning one survey into over 30 reports, videos and data sets, customized for differing audiences.

Andrew Lippman of the MIT Media Lab discusses the problems associated with trying to build products that will have appeal for a long time. The alternative? Build architectures that allow people to build their own products.

A new article in MIT Sloan Management Review argues that mass customization could make sense for most businesses.

Most companies can benefit from mass customization, yet few do. The key is to think of it as a process for aligning a business with its customers’ needs.

A continuum of strategies shows that while some industries favor customization and some foster standardization, others mix the two in their products, processes, and customer transactions in intriguing ways.