Mid-December saw the launch of a long-awaited new addition to how we at the LEGO Group collaborate with our amazing fan community. Rebrick.com is the name of a fantastic new site that aggregates all the wonderful LEGO fan creations in one place, making what is often hard to find visible to all and directing traffic back to all the places where amazing LEGO creations are posted.

The site’s raison d’être is to help bookmark all the creations made out of LEGO bricks, whether it is YouTube movies, LEGO models of Large Hadron colliders or classroom content. While we don’t often launch work in progress – the Rebrick.com site is in fact in Beta and what that means is we really want to hear your comments and suggestions to improving the site, just as much as we want to you to use it, populate it with the awesome things you find and create. The Rebrick site is our way of celebrating all the amazing creativity displayed by our fans and giving something back to all who love LEGO bricks and the system for what is.. something more than a toy – it is a creative medium!

The LEGO Group has collaborated with Elephant design, the originators of the Cuusoo idea since 2010 to explore how new LEGO product ideas could be crowd-sourced by users making a ‘wish’. Here your mission is to come up with a great product idea and find 10,000 people who also think it’s a great idea. The wonderful Shinkai 6500 submersible is one of the fantastic products that have already come out of this collaboration. Now the site is launching internationally and we hope that an even bigger audience of fans and designers out there will come forward with great ideas of what LEGO designers should be making. Check out the site here.

For my own sanity’s sake I keep following a 3-pronged approach when it comes to understanding trends, an approach I originally came across courtesy of Unilever and having chewed on it for quite some time, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is a very powerful way to understand the difference between cause and effect in the arena of trends.

The word ‘Trends’ in itself has become somewhat of an overused term and tons of institutions now deliver trend reports of various calibres, sometimes causing more confusion than clarity and this because everything is muddled together: Macroeconomic drivers meeting consumer anxieties in some niche expression through one single on-line service provider isn’t exactly a trend, it is an expression, which may be the correct expression to capitalise on a nascent consumer trend, but it’s longevity as a business is dependent on other factors in addition than the survival of the potential trend that spawned it. Thus it has to be evaluated as an expression, not as the mother trend – if that makes sense?

Back to the 3-pronged approach: Firstly we must seek to understand

1. Drivers
• External drivers - these are out of the control of individual
  consumers, but somewhere along the line they may have an impact on your
  life. Examples are the global economy, climate change, political risk
  and so on.
• Internal drivers – These are value, aspiration, needs and demands
  driven and influence the life of consumers.
2. Trends – trends are really about how consumers respond to the above drivers through their behaviour. It’s not about whether black is in our out, it’s more about understanding that fundamentally our needs don’t change that quickly, but external and internal drivers will create new opportunities for those needs to be met, which conveniently leads us onto the third point:
3. Expressions – These are ways in which the trends are expressed in consumers’ day to day lives, examples illustrating how businesses for instance are exploiting the trends today.

So bearing this distinction in mind, it is easier when you come across anything labelled a ‘trend’ to understand whether this is in fact an external or internal driver, a consumer response to the former in the form of behaviour or indeed an expression of the trend in the form of a business.

By keeping a keen eye out for the drivers, both internal and external over time it becomes possible to stay ahead of the curve so to speak, to anticipate trends and expressions, rather than merely notice more and more obscure new businesses cropping up. This is hard and of course it helps constantly being on the look-out for many different kinds of information, sources and so on, but also consciously engaging in monitoring something will gradually make you more sensitive to small changes and being able to identify the crucial indicators in a field that tell you when something is about to change.