The world is changing fast and those not even aware of the change are children growing up with tablets as playthings and the internet in their beds. A space rife with legislation around privacy and child safety, under pressure to be relevant and engaging in ever decreasing attention spans – designing for children is…
Category: LEGO
Engineering Shared Value Creation
Can ecosystems be engineered or are they by default out of control of individuals? Can companies be founded on the explicit intent to nurture ecosystems of value creation? How do you counter disruption and turn it into a force for company growth rather than a ticking time-bomb of eventual corporate demise? From brands to ecosystems The opportunity…
Co-Design and Collaboration
This Thursday sees a number of leading lights from the world of design and innovation, and myself, join forces for what promises to be an exciting session session at the Global Design Forum, part of the London Design Festival 2014. We will be discussing the role of designers in a world increasingly connected, and where traditional singular design…
Re-imagining learning in the 21st Century through play
Last week I had the privilege to join the leading lights from the field of play, learning, child development and creativity gathering in the sleepy town of Billund, home of the LEGO Group and the LEGO Foundation, and dedicating three days to re-defining play and re-imagining learning. The Conference this year sought to make a break with…
Change in organisations is similar to bi-polar disorder in individuals
This was the shocking insight I discovered recently when reading a research paper published by Bain & Company. According to the authors, the emotional turmoil associated with large scale change inside organisations is a series of moodswings between the extremes of euphoria and depression, created by our collective fear of the unknown, loss aversion,…
LEGO System: A tool to think with
LEGO play, I have learned, is one of the most powerful ways to unlock curiosity, imagination, creativity and learning. It draws strength from a system whereby you don’t need to know each individual brick, to intuitively know how you can fit them together. Moreover, the bricks can be put together and taken apart by…
Celebrating LEGO fan creations on Rebrick.com
Image credit: Mike Doyle 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…
Consumer Driven part II: Using technology to fuel real time feedback and innovation
This most recent paper on creating a real-time feedback loop to enable the truly consumer driven company is a follow-on to the previous paper I shared this blog on consumer driven innovation. It explains the challenge of getting closer to what people want, and how technology can help in creating a consumer-focused process for continuous…
Make your LEGO wish come true
Originally a site in Japanese only, Cuusoo means “wish” in Japanese and the name of a great concept for crowdsourcing product ideas. The site is a veritable treasure trove of ideas suggested by users, where others vote on the ideas by committing to buying it should the product get produced. The LEGO Group has…
Transforming the LEGO Group
A great interview this morning with our CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp elaborates on something frequently misunderstood – the difference between a turnaround and transformation. He explains the profound changes that the LEGO Group have undergone since its days of crisis in early 2000 and what it took to get there, yes – you guessed…
Creativity as a basic human need
Picasso is quoted as having said that “every child is an artist” and I would agree, the challenge is how to remain one when you grow up. What is particularly troubling is all the talk about creative people, like they are somehow a class of their own and different from the rest of us….
Powerful brands cannot be controlled
Someone asked me a while ago about how we can control the LEGO brand given that it has such a vibrant community? I tried not to laugh, because the person had a very straight look on their face and besides, laughing would be rude – it is actually a serious question that many brands…
