Abstract
To innovate stakeholder value, designers, business strategists, and marketers rely on shared understanding to co-create value. While co-creation is established in strategic design, practitioners use related terms interchangeably, including co-creation and Mass Customisation (MC). While conflicting terminology enables stakeholder participation, resources and knowledge are fragmented, obstructing a unified practice and limiting shared understanding of value creation. This paper clarifies co-creation and MC terms, explains why practitioners interchange terminology, and examines how stakeholder value and disciplinary perspectives shape their usage. We analysed 828 academic papers across the design, business, and innovation disciplines, focusing on commonly confused lexicons. We reveal that designers, business strategists, and marketers hold incompatible interpretations —from product creation to strategic value —because each discipline values participation differently, confining fashion practices to existing, repetitive models that limit innovation. To solve this conundrum, we propose Inter-Poly-Creation (IPC), which unifies terminology and bridges participation as a continuum of collaboration.
Keywords
Fashion Business, Value, Strategy, Terminology
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.837
Citation
Chan, H., Parker, C.J., and Southee, D.J. (2026) Inter-Poly-Creation (IPC): Unifying Mass Customisation and Co-Creation, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.837
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Inter-Poly-Creation (IPC): Unifying Mass Customisation and Co-Creation
To innovate stakeholder value, designers, business strategists, and marketers rely on shared understanding to co-create value. While co-creation is established in strategic design, practitioners use related terms interchangeably, including co-creation and Mass Customisation (MC). While conflicting terminology enables stakeholder participation, resources and knowledge are fragmented, obstructing a unified practice and limiting shared understanding of value creation. This paper clarifies co-creation and MC terms, explains why practitioners interchange terminology, and examines how stakeholder value and disciplinary perspectives shape their usage. We analysed 828 academic papers across the design, business, and innovation disciplines, focusing on commonly confused lexicons. We reveal that designers, business strategists, and marketers hold incompatible interpretations —from product creation to strategic value —because each discipline values participation differently, confining fashion practices to existing, repetitive models that limit innovation. To solve this conundrum, we propose Inter-Poly-Creation (IPC), which unifies terminology and bridges participation as a continuum of collaboration.