{"id":4710,"date":"2017-03-20T17:53:25","date_gmt":"2017-03-20T21:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/lego-ideas-leveraging-crowds-to-design-your-product-for-you\/"},"modified":"2017-03-20T17:53:25","modified_gmt":"2017-03-20T21:53:25","slug":"lego-ideas-leveraging-crowds-to-design-your-product-for-you","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/lego-ideas-leveraging-crowds-to-design-your-product-for-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Lego Ideas: Leveraging crowds to design your product for you"},"content":{"rendered":"

LEGO IDEAS<\/strong><\/p>\n

One company that is leveraging crowd sourcing to design creative new products while simultaneously building a community based platform is LEGO through its LEGO ideas website. Users are given freedom to design their own lego products from scratch using free\u00a0software provided by Lego and then vote on the ideas that they like best. Lego takes the most popular designs and actually finalizes, manufactures, and\u00a0sells them as LEGO branded products. It is a great way for the company to get innovative new ideas for products for a very low cost, while simultaneously engaging customers with the brand through an online community. [1]<\/p>\n

How it works<\/strong><\/p>\n

The platform consists of several elements: user submissions, user discovery, community and blogging. Users can design their own project using the platform\u2019s \u201cproject page\u201d that enables users to build extremely detailed custom Lego projects through a software program that enables LEGO to seamlessly convert the final design into a product that can be manufactured. Next, users submit the finalized designs for all of the community to see. Using the \u201cdiscover\u201d section (see below for screen shot), users can then browse all submitted projects using various filters (such as recent or most supported) and \u201csupport\u201d projects that they like and would like to see turned into a purchasable set. Additionally, they can leave comments and suggestions to discuss different elements of the design. In addition to these features, there is also a community page where users can browse profiles of other users, sorted by \u201cclutch power\u201d which is a resource that members get for participating in activities throughout the site. Finally, a blog section exists for selected users to share more about themselves and why they have such a passion for design work as well as how they thought of their ideas. \"\"<\/a>Screen shot of “discover” page<\/p>\n

All designs that gain 10,000 votes of support in a 6 month period are deemed \u201celigible for review\u201d where Lego decides whether or not it will actually manufacture and sell the designs. Primary reasons that designs are rejected by the company after proving high levels of support are IP infringement, inappropriate content for younger users (such as guns, sex references, or alcohol),\u00a0 and design characteristics that would make the project unprofitable (such as too many unique pieces).<\/p>\n

Incentivizing participation<\/strong><\/p>\n

The primary motivation for a user to develop a design on the platform is that they get the chance to design a LEGO set that they would love to actually own and have a real chance that LEGO will produce it. As a kid I would have absolutely loved something like this as I dreamed up ideas for sets that did not exist, and this platform would have given me some hope that one day my ideas could become reality. However, the other two primary tools of motivation for users to design ideas is money and community recognition. First off, any user who develops an idea that makes it all the way through and is selected to be developed into an actual LEGO set is given a free copy of the produced set and a 1% royalty on all sales associated with it (which could potentially be a decent amount of money).[1]<\/p>\n

Value Creation and capture<\/strong><\/p>\n

This crowdsourcing platform is rather genius in that it creates value in several different ways, while allowing the company to capture nearly all of it (at least the financial value). For starters, the obvious value created is the actual designs that are crowdsourced: Lego gets thousands of free design submissions without having to actually produce any of them unless their specific design criteria are met. The designs that ARE selected have all received 10,000 votes of support by the community, which indicates that demand for these sets will be relatively high once they enter into production. Additionally, because Lego has created an active community around the platform, users become more engaged with the Lego brand and are probably more likely to buy Lego products (particularly the designs that are crowd sourced) as a result. [2]<\/p>\n

Users receive a 1% royalty which is not particularly high given that they did what is perhaps the hardest part of the process for Lego (creative idea generation and demand testing), but also receive a high amount of value associated with being recognized within the community through status points on their profiles and high rankings on the \u201cmost supported\u201d projects. These things are valuable to the users but cost Lego very little money to do. [3]<\/p>\n

Challenges<\/strong><\/p>\n

Selecting appropriate design criteria while still giving freedom of creativity to users: <\/em>Lego puts relatively strict design criteria that can cause them to reject producing user generated concepts that generate 10,000 votes of support. These criteria disallow certain themes, IP infringement violations, and help weed out unprofitable overly complex designs. However, in 2015 these criteria were set a little too strict, and in one phase none of the projects that reached 10,000 support votes met the criteria. This is\u00a0potentially a large problem\u00a0as it destroys a lot of user\u2019s motivation to participate and submit additional designs if none are being produced. [4]<\/p>\n

Managing inappropriate posts and offensive concepts:<\/em> Because users are given a high degree of flexibility with their designs (they can literally come up with anything built out of Legos), they can potentially post content that is offensive to other users. In order to manage the community, Lego added a \u201cflag as offensive\u201d button to all posts that users can submit \u2013 which allows them to monitor and remove offensive posts without having to pay an employee to constantly scan posted content.<\/p>\n

Growth potential<\/strong><\/p>\n

Over 20 crowdsourced concepts have been produced by Lego since the launch of the platform and activity on the platform is still quite high (there are currently several projects nearing 10,000 votes and multiple with hundreds of comments). While I don\u2019t see this\u00a0as a channel\u00a0that will actually displace Lego\u2019s traditional design processes, it will surely serve as a useful complement to it going forward, while also building a community around the brand that will make all of its customers more loyal.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

SOURCES<\/p>\n

[1] https:\/\/ideas.lego.com\/<\/em><\/p>\n

[2] http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/digits\/2015\/02\/25\/legos-plan-to-find-the-next-big-hit-crowdsource-it\/<\/em><\/p>\n

[3] https:\/\/www.crowdsource.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/crowdsourcing-win-lego-taps-into-the-crowd-to-drive-product-innovation\/<\/p>\n

[4] http:\/\/www.brothers-brick.com\/2015\/10\/30\/lego-ideas-fails-all-15-projects-in-first-round-of-reviews-for-2015-news\/<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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