Why LEGO succeeded

1. LEGO makes toys. LEGO doesn’t produce weapons, it doesn’t produce soap or soup, it produces toys. LEGO has been around long enough for all of us to have played with it when we were kids. We know how they work, we like what they do, and maybe we wish that we were still playing with them right now (especially since they’ve gotten even cooler). The memories attached to LEGO (as with other toys) are unusually positive and emotional. Campbell or Clorox, to name two other companies which recently started to try to transform customers into innovators, fail to spark the same kind of joyful memory and enthusiasm as LEGO. Stefan Lindegaard wrote two great posts on the mistakes they seem to make on their OI platforms. I think that they could more specifically learn from LEGO. Here’s how:

2. (Nearly) all LEGO products are customizable, educational and technical. Customization goes very far at LEGO: on the LEGO factory website you can design your own houses, animals and spaces using something close to the software that LEGO designers use. If you wish, you can order the parts to your virtual construction and LEGO will send them to you. Parents who buy LEGO prefer toys that help their kids learn and develop, as opposed to toys that are just ready-to-use once they’ve torn them out of their packaging. Building with LEGOs makes kids active and apparently more technically inclined–they can either follow the directions to build things like police stations and pirate hideouts or use the pieces to invent their own model. LEGO seems to encourage kids to leave the beaten path. So kids who like LEGOs (and especially LEGO technic) are more likely become tech-savvy adults (and parents) that are easy to tap for the Open Innovation effort.

3. The gap between user and developer is relatively small with LEGO. As opposed to soap (or soup), you buy LEGOs because you value the challenge of building and the idea of making your own product. Most products are used in a much more limited sense. To use soap (or Windows, actually) you don’t need any of the skills that you would need to develop it. For a few years, to use computer software (this was true until MS-DOS) you needed some rudimentary knowledge of programming. Before Windows, computers were products where the line between developer and user was thin, which made it easier to appeal to users for help in development: Open Source communities emerged. And making a product more “user-friendly”, generally means to make it less (obviously) technical, hiding the technics far below the user interface.

4. LEGO’s OI challenges are embedded within a community. With videos, blogs, pictures from users, downloadable pictures, and online support, the Mindstorms Nxt platform gives you the feeling that, 1) participating in a LEGO challenge makes you part of a worldwide community of shared interests and pleasures, and 2) that the company really cares about you and your ideas. An online form like the one on the spartan Campbell site just doesn’t give you this feeling.

5. LEGO’s challenges are precise while remaining open, e.g. “we challenge you to build a robot based on an arcade game”. We’ve written about the problem of formalizing a problem before. But to keep it short: the key element is specificity. Even if you are open for various kinds of proposals, it won’t do just to say “Send us anything you think could be useful.”

6. LEGO’s successful adaptation of offline toys and their design on an online platform gives you the feeling of entering a universe when you enter the website. This is something many companies aim at, although few of them suceed.

The lessons other companies can learn

Now, the question is: what can companies do if they don’t have a product as well-suited to OI as LEGO’s?

1. Be conscious that marketing a product for co-development is not the same as marketing the product. Emphasize the play. Try hard to show the playful aspect of your products: create animation videos, drawings, shoot videos with engineers passionate about the project, etc.

2. Identify the biggest draw.  Spot your company’s product that is most customizable, playful, technical and start your initiative with that. This is the product with the right audience for a participative effort. LEGO started with LEGO technic, but extended the program to include all kinds of LEGO bricks with the LEGO factory that demands less technical skills.

3. There are products more up or down the line from users to developers. If you have technical products that require greater competence for use, use them for you OI efforts.

4. Create a community. Show that you care about outside innovators. LEGO lets you ask questions, makes users interact, mentions those who have contributed to an idea. Campbell, on the other side, states in their contract that they will never explain the refusal of an idea and that they will only pay if your idea becomes a patent (ouch!).

4. Break it down. Be precise and appealing in your problem statement. Otherwise, you’ll lose your time reviewing answers that are not on-target, if you get any. Choose to create discrete, precise challenges rather than going for a catch-all. A catch-all statement will look like you don’t know what you want, and that means that others won’t know, either. Think about #2 and 3 to choose the right product for your Open Innovation début.

5. Create a universe. A picture of the CEO and a “Submit your ideas” button is not going to do the job. Campbell, for example, could rely on Andy Warhol’s taste for their soup and give its site more of a “pop” look to  give you the feeling that their soups are iconic and that contributing to the development of such a product is rewarding. Clorox could put up some animations of the products they already have, show drawings, present the first formula that led to their first product, etc.

All this obviously takes a lot of work and time, probably even someone in the company who is only in charge of Open Innovation. Companies that are impatient and want to find out what they can learn from the outside right away, and who’d rather like to start experimenting with opening their corporate context with more limited costs and effort, should try to use a website with a community that is already in place, with people that signed up because they are interested in sharing their ideas and solving problems wherever they may come from, a place designed from top to bottom for problem solving and innovation, by people who only think about how to make the experience of problem solving more rewarding. A platform like this.

Klaus-Peter Speidel

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