LEGO's renaissance through innovation

The TV show Toutes Taxes Comprises (T.T.C.) tells us how the firm LEGO was reborn after having suffered from the competition of the electronic games market.
Dominique Foray explains to the journalists how LEGO innovated by presenting the example of the Robot Mindstorm, brought on the market in 1998. Users’ Communities further developed this fun and flexible robot quickly, by improving its technology and thus increasing the sales. These communities appeared to be large – up to 20’000 members.

LEGO needed some time to fully realize that these communities represented an incredible reservoir of competences. Traditionally, in order to innovate, a firm develops its competences either internally through an R&D department or by creating external partnerships with universities e.g.

These Users’ Communities represent a new force for the innovation of the firm. The final objective of LEGO is to sell its products, therefore it didn’t try to slow down the creativity of these communities by imposing rights on Intellectual Propriety of the Robot developments. Instead, LEGO integrated some innovations brought by the users in its new products and has even hired some of the hackers in their R& D department.

This phenomenon, called Democratization of Innovation, aims to capture competences where the end user is located and not within the firm or in external research centers. LEGO was able to seize this opportunity, which helped the company to become successful again.