LEGO Ideas

Crowds are good at ideas. Ideas are the cheap part.

Quirky learned that the expensive way. Over a million community members submitted product ideas and voted on them; the company engineered, manufactured and retailed the winners. It raised $185 million and went bankrupt in 2015. The crowd supplied the ideas; Quirky carried every expensive part: engineering, tooling, inventory and retail risk. And the votes measured novelty. Nobody measured demand.

Now put LEGO next to it, because the comparison is almost laboratory-clean. LEGO Ideas invites the same crowd behaviour: fans design sets, the community votes. But look at the design of the exchange.

A fan design is only reviewed after ten thousand strangers have voted for it. Demand is validated before a single brick is tooled. The winning sets are produced inside LEGO's existing factory, distribution and brand. LEGO is an accountable absorber that already knows how to make and sell. The designer gets one percent of revenue and the credit.

Run the method over it

LEGO keeps its objective, and the fan keeps theirs. The platform has over a million members and tens of thousands of submissions, and it has produced a steady stream of some of the company's best-selling sets.

Two conditions do the work. Demand validated before investment: ten thousand votes before one mould. And an absorber: the accountable organisation that turns contributed brilliance into made, sold, supported reality. Quirky never had that organ.

Same crowd, same creativity, opposite architecture. The capability was always there. What decided the outcome was the absorber. Skip it and you end up crowdfunding a bankruptcy.