Lego co-creates crowd favorites on a global scale

Since inception, LEGO has embodied the values and virtues of creativity and innovation. In 2012, the legendary toy brand approached Chaordix to power its global open innovation community. LEGO Ideas brings together passionate fans and creators from around the world to imagine, iterate, and evaluate ideas for new LEGO kits. Fast forward a few years and the community has skyrocketed to over 875,000 members who have submitted over 20,000 new kit concepts. LEGO has taken 19 community co-created kits to market – most often to immediate sell-outs due to the overwhelming demand from the community members.

From the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine to the Women of NASA, LEGO Ideas provides a text-book example of effective customer co-creation and open innovation.

LEGO Ideas Screenshot

The Challenge

LEGO fans are as loyal and creative as they come. Looking to engage this global fan-base to co-create new products, shorten time to market, and generate product demand, LEGO sought a solution that would enable true customer co-creation. This tool needed to be easy to use for fans of all ages and put the crowd to work in narrowing down thousands of ideas to select the best.

Women of Nasa LEGO Kit

Extremely successful from a financial perspective. Basically, we can shorten our product development cycle down from two years to about six months.

Stiven Kerestegian

Innovation & Direction Design Lead,

The LEGO Group

The Solution

LEGO Ideas. The goal was to create a platform where anyone could create and upload a new LEGO kit design. Any idea that receives 10,000 supports in 12 months is reviewed by LEGO’s production and legal team for feasibility. Each year, several kit ideas are selected and taken to market.

The Result

LEGO Ideas has reduced the time to market for new LEGO kits from 2 years to 6 months. In just over 4.5 years, 19 new LEGO kits have been developed from the Ideas community. All were best sellers, with 90% selling out in their first release.

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