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Manufacturing and services constitute two of the five sectors of every country’s economy; depending on the maturity of the economy, they are — in terms of employment — typically the two largest sectors. The outputs or products of an economy can also be divided into goods products (due to manufacturing, construction, agriculture and mining) and services products. To date, the goods and services products have, for the most part, been mass produced; it is the premise of this paper that recent technological advances — including flexible manufacturing, cloud computing, nanotechnology and smart sensing — can better enable the transformation from mass production to mass customization. We regard mass customization as the simultaneous and real time management of supply and demand chains, based on a taxonomy that can be defined in terms of its underpinning component and management foci. From …