Lego Innovation: An Example of Crowdsourcing Design

 

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

-Peter Drucker

 

Have you done any recent reading or research on crowdsourcing design? We follow this topic quite closely and have written several blogs on the topic and the businesses that employ it. Crowdsourcing design is not just for new entrants challenging established players; the latter can also leverage crowdsourcing to their advantage, enabling users to design new products and test the demand at the same time.

 

Related: Studying Innovative Change for Creative Business Ideas

 

And for the younger generation, crowdsourcing is simply a normal way of doing things. That’s the key lesson I learned this morning as I heard my grandson explain how Lego created his Lego Minecraft set.

 

The Lego Crowdsourcing Objective

Lego has become a mammoth of the toy industry, but a nimble mammoth, one that seems quite able to adapt to the climate change of product design in the age of crowdsourcing. After prototyping, testing, and refining their concept for three years in Japan, Lego has recently gone global with the beta-version of its Cuusoo crowdsourcing platform. Their simple objectives were to increase the number of product ideas while improving on their customer engagement.

 

Their Crowdsourcing Business Model

The business model is simple: any user can submit a product design, which other users will be able to vote for. When a submission racks up 10,000 votes it gets a formal stage-gate review and unless legal flaws or other showstoppers are identified, it moves into production. The idea creator receives a 1% royalty on the net revenue. It is too early to say how many voted-for submissions will fail the internal stage-gate review, but if Lego manages to provide clear feedback about submissions that fail, it will maintain the transparency of the scheme, which is essential to keeping the user base engaged.

 

The Payoffs to Lego

Lego enjoys unprecedented benefits from this crowdsourced product development process:

 

A wider community for the ideation phase, which will inevitably turn up many more ideas than Lego’s own designers, however talented, could do. In classic crowdsourcing fashion, the Shinkai 6500 submarine … the first project that emerged through this process – saw the Lego amateur designers reach out to the marine life scientific community for advice.

 

A very cost-efficient development phase, whereby unsuccessful projects cost nothing to Lego and projects that go into production attract a very modest 1% royalty cost.

 

A virtually free pre-launch campaign through the voting phase that creates a buzz among the fan base and provides a clear metric on what the fan base wants to buy.

 

Takeaways

What we found most interesting in this concept is its simplicity. Making the simple complicated is commonplace … but making the complicated simple, awesomely simple is real creativity!

 

Lots of ideas are being generated and the process is definitely great at customer engagement.

 

We believe its success will generate more business experimentation in crowdsourcing. Lego deserves lots of credit and kudos for pushing the envelope.

 

What are some of your experiences with utilizing innovation and crowdsourcing? Please share an experience with this community.

 

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.

 

It’s up to you to keep improving your business innovation process and efforts. Lessons are all around you. In some cases, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. Or collaborating with you. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

 

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

 

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

 

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

 

Are you devoting enough energy improving your creativity, innovation and ideas?

 

Do you have a lesson about making your creativity better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

 

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  

 

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.

  

More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Studying Innovative Change for Creative Business Ideas

The Most Innovative Company? Our Answer May Surprise You

Google and Innovation … What Is the Larry Page Vision?

 

 

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