Theme: Innovation

Lego - Creating new products from community ideas

Pelin Alexandra, EMREI-191

General information about LEGO:
• Lego is a line of plastic construction toys that are
manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company
based in Billund, Denmark.
• The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of colourful
interlocking plastic bricks accompanying an array of gears,
figurines called minifigures, and various other parts.
• Lego pieces can be assembled and connected in many ways to
construct objects, including vehicles, buildings, and working
robots. Anything constructed can be taken apart again, and the
pieces reused to make new things.
• Lego is another example of how engaging your users creates
more value. Lego activates its users through its 
Create and Share site as well as the Lego Ideas site.
• The Create and Share site lets Lego community members share
their designs and Lego pictures, while the Ideas site actually
aims for new product releases. 
• As an example, the mini-Big Bang Theory Lego set is a
community-based product that originated in the Lego Ideas.
When the amount of supporters reaches 10k, Lego evaluates
the design and the design can hit the stores under the Lego
Ideas product label.
• The idea for mini-Big Bang Theory was submitted over 2 years
ago and it took the project over 10 months to get from the
Ideas site to production.
• When the product ideas are approved for production, the
original community members that ideated the product also get
monetary compensation. The mini-Big Bang Theory is just one
example. More recent products that are yet to be released in the
Lego Ideas series are, for example
 the Adventure Time themed set and 
the Beatles - Yellow Submarine set.
• The community provides Lego with thousands of new ideas
annually, which means that Lego has a steady flow of free ideas
that people are already waiting to buy. This open innovation
approach in their product design phase is said to be one of the
core factors for Lego’s successful brand. It has definitely been
one of the things that saved their brand and made them stay at
the top of the market.
Practical takeaways
• If you make products directly to consumers, aim to activate your
users into helping you create products that fit their desires.
• When the users interact with one another and tell you what they
would want to see on the store shelves, you probably have ready
demand, and can save a lot of resources on market research and
reduce the inherent risk in R&D.
• Getting their voices heard can build a base of committed users. Just
make sure you have the capability to implement at least some of the
most popular ideas and communicate that well so that your
customers can feel like they really made an impact. 
• It’s noteworthy that the same model of user activation might not
work as well in other kinds of environments, such as in some B2B
contexts with a smaller customer base.