1. Read the mini case study LEGO. Ideas innovation and crowdsourcing reenergised the company on page 50 of your text.

2. Think about a company that could use the same type of strategy. Explain how that company might do so.

Case Study 2.3 LEGO. Ideas innovation and crowdsourcing reenergised the company

In the 1990s and early 2000s, as children started to prefer video games and computers to plastic blocks, LEGO was close to bankruptcy.

Their solution was the implementation of open innovation and crowdsourcing. In 2008 LEGO launched the online platform LEGO Cuusoo, allowing LEGO fans to become actively involved in the new product development process, both in the idea generation and the screening.

With LEGO Cuusoo, users could produce a page describing their new concept and then share it with others to elicit their reactions. LEGO fans could collaborate with others on LEGO projects. The LEGO Review Board, composed of designers, product managers and other key team members, would evaluate projects that reached 10,000 supporters for playability, safety and fit with the LEGO brand, and winners would receive 1 per cent of the total net sales of the product.

One of the first products based on this open innovation and crowdsourcing was the Hayabusa 369-piece building set, a model of the world's first mission probe to collect samples from the surface of an asteroid and return them to Earth.

At the end of April 2014, LEGO renamed the platform LEGO Ideas and continues to encourage fans to submit 'projects'.

Between 2011 and 2019 LEGO Ideas has released 26 sets with a further 29 sets announced. The majority of the released sets relate to television or film franchises including Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Adventure Time and Tron. LEGO has subsequently cross-licensed the released sets to populate its toys-to-life platform game LEGO Dimensions.

Sources: Mejia (2014) and Ideaconnection (2013)