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MASSOLUTION NYC 2013: LEGO ON INSPIRING THE BUILDERS OF TOMORROW
By Eric Blattberg
Sept. 19, 2013
NEW YORK — Onstage at Massolution NYC 2013, LEGO Senior Business Developer
Troels Andersen highlighted some of the company’s crowdsourcing initiatives and
explained how they work alongside — and in some cases inform - its more
traditional product development processes.
The Denmark-based LEGO Group is an old company with an established business
model: founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen, LEGO has been selling its
trademark LEGO bricks for over 50 years. Today, LEGO sells its products in more
than 130 companies, making it the second largest toy company in the world.
But despite its success, the privately-owned company has remained agile and
innovative, blazing a trail for other enterprises in the crowdsourcing arena.
In the weeks following the initial launch of the LEGO Mindstorm product,
thousands of hackers cracked the hardware kits and did things LEGO never
imagined with the programmable robots. Instead of pushing back, LEGO embraced
the open ideal and built easy access into future versions of the product. It
also inspired LEGO to explore other crowdsourcing ventures.
“We wanted to investigate crowd-based business models and find out how they were
working together with the big corporate machine,” said Andersen.
In 2008, LEGO launched an open innovation platform called Cuusoo, which allows
fans to submit product ideas to the broader LEGO community. Although the
platform is still in beta — it just opened up to a non-Japanese audience in late
2011 - Cuusoo already has 412,000 registered users who have collectively
submitted more than 5,500 product ideas. If an idea reaches 10,000 votes of
support from the community, LEGO will consider turning it into an official set.
“The difference between a fan-made model and a LEGO designer-made model isn’t
that great, because they understand how we make our products,” noted Andersen.
Several community submissions have already made the jump from idea to realized
product, including the extremely popular LEGO Minecraft set. Although LEGO owns
the IP for all the ideas Cuusoo users submit, the company shares one percent of
revenue generated from product sales with the community creators.
LEGO’s crowdsourcing initiatives will co-exist alongside its traditional product
development.
“If we are interested in getting mass retail behind a product, we need to tie it
into shelf spaces in stores,” said Andersen. “It doesn’t work with Toys R’ Us
when we say, ‘Ok, we’re going to come out with a new product in three months,
but I’m not sure what it’s going to be.’
“The way we’re mitigating that is to work with online retail for launch … and if
it proves its potential to stay around long enough, we decide to offer it to
more traditional retailers.”
LEGO recognizes there are risks to opening up its product development to the
crowd — a very vocal community gets to see (and sometimes criticize) the
company’s decision-making in near real-time — but believes the benefits vastly
outweigh any potential drawbacks. The LEGO Group’s mission is not only to
inspire and developer the builders of tomorrow, but to be inspired by that very
same crowd.
Crowdsourcing.org
MASSolutionNYC2013
-end of report-
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