Lego Success Built on Open Innovation

Mike Schoultz

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3 min read

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Jul 7, 2021

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The breakthrough here is how open innovation and crowdsourcing helped to reinvent the construction toy. The company is Lego Group, Denmark. Here is the story.
The ‘open’ in open innovation can reveal itself in a number of ways. For example, it can refer to overcoming the “not invented here” syndrome by welcoming external input.

Openness is “outside-in” when it makes greater use of external brainpower for its innovations. There is also another kind of openness in which a company opens up its ideas and technologies to be used by other companies, even competitors.

Lego Mindstorms is a classic example of the “outside-in” open innovation model where the company has allowed customers to create designs.

Programmable Construction Toys

In the 1990s Lego was facing bankruptcy. With the arrival of the video games age the plastic bricks were seen…