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January 30, 2006
Lego evangelists help design products
Lego, long-time maker of cute and colorful construction blocks, is embracing its diehard customer evangelists to help develop the next-generation of its Mindstorms programmable robotics kit. So says Wired.
Lego sells 40,000 Mindstorm kits a year at $199 each -- with no advertising. They're Lego's all-time best-selling product.
For the next generation kits, which arrive in August '06, Lego scrapped its heretofore successful design and started over, basically outsourcing the design to a small team of Mindstorm expert users. Lego calls the group Mindstorms User Panel, or MUP.
Sounds like a gutsy move but better to make your own system obsolete rather than a competitor do it for you. From the article:
Inviting customers to innovate isn't just about building better products. Opening the process engenders goodwill and creates a buzz among the zealots, a critical asset for products like Mindstorms that rely on word-of-mouth evangelism.
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Just a couple of clarifications - the existing design wasn't scrapped really. It was time, after something like 7 years to bring the system up to date. It was a pretty amazing system, and still is. But there's been so many tech and production innovations since the original Mindstorms launched in 1998 that we were able to create a great many cool new features and improvements. The roots of the system are based in all the learnings garnered in the last 7 years.
The MUP was something I put together in conjunction with the colleagues on the product design team. The design process wasn't outsourced to the fans (the MUPs) although they were literally "sitting" on the design team (albeit remotely/virtually). The 4 original MUPs participated in top-secret for literally a year, helping to influence the design as well as having many of their design implemented. It's been a wonderful process, and not surprisingly (at least to me) didn't cause any of the problems that were worried about in the beginning.
For more info on the project, you can check out these entries on my corporate blog:
http://www.bricksonthebrain.com/blog/index.cfm?commentID=475
http://www.bricksonthebrain.com/blog/index.cfm?commentID=482
Hope this is interesting!
Jake
