No abstract

In the present study a covariance structure model is tested to identify the causes of entrepreneurial intent among engineering students. Specifically, we explore whether steady personal dispositions or whether perceptions of contextual founding conditions have an impact on the intention to found one's own business.The survey of 512 students at the MIT School of Engineering broadly confirms the model. Personality traits have a strong impact on the attitude towards self-employment. The entrepreneurial attitude is strongly linked with the intention to start a new venture. The students' personality therefore shows an indirect effect on intentions. Furthermore, the entrepreneurial intent is directly affected by perceived barriers and support factors in the entrepreneurship-related context. The findings have important implications for policy makers inside and outside universities.

Many companies offer websites that enable customers to design their own individual products, which the manufacturer can then produce to order. To date, the economic value of products self-designed using mass customization (MC) toolkits has been attributed to the two factors of preference fit achieved (which should be as high as possible) and design effort (which should be as low as possible). On the basis of literature on behavioral decision making, we suggest a third factor, namely the awareness of being the creator of the product design. In the course of five different studies, we provide experimental evidence that this “I designed it myself” effect creates economic value for the customer. Regardless of the two other factors, self-designed products generate a significantly higher willingness to pay. This effect is mediated by feelings of accomplishment and moderated by the outcome of the process as well as the individual's perceived contribution to the self-design process. These findings have important implications for MC companies: It is not enough merely to design MC toolkits in such a way that preference fit is maximized and design effort is minimized. To capture the full value of MC, toolkits should also elicit “I designed it myself” feelings.

Recently, researchers have paid increasing attention to the marketing strategy of customization. A key assumption is that customized products create higher benefits for customers than standard products because they deliver a closer preference fit. The prerequisite for this effect is the ability to obtain precise information on what customers actually want. But are customers able to specify their preferences that precisely? Several theoretical arguments raise doubts about this, implicitly challenging the value of customization. The authors conduct two studies in which they find that products customized on the basis of expressed preferences bring about significantly higher benefits for customers in terms of willingness to pay, purchase intention, and attitude toward the product than standard products. The benefit gain is higher if customers have (1) better insight into their own preferences, (2) a better ability to express their preferences, and (3) greater product involvement. This suggests that customization has the potential to be a powerful marketing strategy if these conditions are met. In the opposite case, firms willing to serve heterogeneous customer preferences need to adapt their customization systems in such a way that they explicitly address the customers' inability to provide valid preference information.

This study analyzes the value created by so-called ''toolkits for user innovation and design,'' a new method of integrating customers into new product development and design. Toolkits allow customers to create their own product, which in turn is produced by the manufacturer. In the present study, questions asked were (1) if customers actually make use of the solution space offered by toolkits, and, if so, (2) how much value the self-design actually creates. In this study, a relatively simple, design-focused toolkit was used for a set of four experiments with a total of 717 participants, 267 of whom actually created their own watches. The heterogeneity of the resulting design solutions was calculated using the entropy concept, and willingness to pay (WTP) was measured by the contingent valuation method and Vickrey auctions. Entropy coefficients showed that self-designed watches vary quite widely. On the other hand, significant patterns still are visible despite this high level of entropy, meaning that customer preferences are highly heterogeneous and diverse in style but not completely random. It also was found that consumers are willing to pay a considerable price premium. Their WTP for a self-designed watch exceeds the WTP for standard watches by far, even for the best-selling standard watches of the same technical quality. On average, a 100% value increment was found for watches designed by users with the help of the toolkit. Taken together, these findings suggest that the toolkit's ability to allow customers to customize products to suit their individual preferences creates value for them in a business-to-consumer (B2C) setting even when only a simple toolkit is employed. Alternative explanations, implications, and necessary future research are discussed.