Mass Customization for Individualized Life-long Learning: Needs, Design, and Implementation

We have reached Globalization 3.0. According to Tom Friedman's book “The World is Flat”, globalization has become a reality not only for countries and international corporations, but also for individuals. How can one single individual compete with millions of other people worldwide? How can one person cope with the exponentially growing resources of knowledge? The answer lies in learning and education – individualized, life-long, efficient, and effective. Our proposal is to replace the paradigm of traditional education with its idea of an “economy of scarcity” with an idea of an “economy of self-generation”. Mass Customization (MC), understood as the roof for mass customization, customer co-creation, and open innovation provides the conceptual and operational framework for analy-zing needs and the status of individualized education. Consistent with MC a system for individualized lifelong learning from kindergarten and school to university and corporate level has been designed and implemented. Consequently, case studies, i.e. the outputs of education are used both for customization and individualization of curricula. Latest findings from neuroscience and systems theory are utilized as a basis for the argumentation. First results are reported and discussed.