关键词: 工业互联网平台嵌入, 大规模定制, 技术距离, 文化距离

Abstract: Mass customization has emerged as a new production model for traditional manufacturing firms to address market competition and meet personalized demands. To tackle customization challenges, most companies opt to embed themselves into industrial internet platforms, yet they also face the difficult choice of dual embeddedness. While the enabling effects of industrial internet platforms in terms of connectivity, value co-creation, and digital services have been widely discussed, few scholars have deeply explored how different forms of platform embeddedness influence participating firms from their perspective, and how these forms affect mass customization within these firms. How do different types of industrial internet platform embeddedness affect mass customisation? And which type of embeddedness exhibits a more significant facilitating mechanism? It remains questions for further investigation. To clarify the mechanisms of industrial internet platform embeddedness, this study introduces a dual embedding strategy—dependency embeddedness and coupling embeddedness—and examines their specific effects under organizational distance dimensions such as technological distance and cultural distance. Based on existing perspectives on industrial internet platform embeddedness, mass customization, and organizational distance, this study proposes theoretical hypotheses on how the two embedding types influence mass customization and how these effects are moderated by technological and cultural distance. Core constructs were measured using contextually adapted Likert scales, and data were collected via questionnaires from 189 Chinese manufacturing firms. Using the sample data, hierarchical regression analysis was employed to test the hypotheses, supplemented by subgroup analyses based on technological and cultural distance, as well as a holistic model test using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to enhance the robustness of the findings. The findings reveal that: (1) Both dependency embeddedness and coupling embeddedness in industrial internet platform effectively promote mass customization in manufacturing firms; (2) Technological distance positively moderates the relationship between coupling embedding and mass customization, enhancing heterogeneous knowledge coupling and modular configuration under integration embedding, but its moderating effect on dependency embeddedness is not significant; (3) Cultural distance negatively moderates the impact of dependency embeddedness but positively moderates the impact of coupling embeddedness, suggesting that cultural differences stimulate production innovation in traditional firms more in complementary, integrative collaborations than in unidirectional dependency relationships. This study contributes to research on industrial internet platform embeddedness and mass customization in several ways: First, it clarifies how industrial internet platforms drive mass customization in participating firms, offering new theoretical insights and perspectives for research on traditional firms’ platform strategies. Second, by focusing on the relationship between industrial internet platforms and mass customization, it highlights the importance of platform embeddedness and enriches research on implementing mass customization in the digital era. Third, by exploring the boundary conditions of dual platform embeddedness under varying organizational distances, it provides new insights into platform embedding strategy selection for traditional firms in contexts of inter-organizational differences.

Key words: Industrial Internet Platform Embeddedness, Mass Customization, Technological distance, Cultural Distance