The LEGO Crowd

Lewis Pinault from Lego Serious Play addressed the Creative Clusters Conference in Glasgow - and I had fun making a duck (see photo).

Lego Serious Play helps businesses think creatively using Lego in group settings to discuss business issues. For example entrepreneurs can express their shared vision for the business by first creating a model which expresses their hopes and fears. This fun activity leads to serious discussion and new insights.

As a bonus, the manual dexterity needed for this kind of creative play stimulates parts of the brain that other activitie do not reach, apparently.

Lego also invites its millions of users to design new bricks and kits for the company. As Lewis Pinault said "this open platform needs tons and tons of volunteer designers." In other words, adopting the Wisdom of Crowds or Crowdsourcing approach, the company uses the ideas and energy of people outside the business to create new products it can sell.

Another example of Crowdsourcing, from the book Wikinomics, is about a Canadian gold mine, Goldcorp Inc, which published its geological information on the internet and offered $575,000 in prize money to anyone who could help them find more gold. Submissions came from all over the world and transformed the $100m company into a $9bn giant.

Instead of keeping information and ideas in-house, sometimes it's better to share data and engage with the crowd to collect new ideas and design better products and services.

PS: The crowd of Lego fans also promote the company indirectly using viral marketing by publishing more than 55,000 videos of their Lego models on YouTube.

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Let me know how your creative business uses Crowdsourcing techniques.

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