New Lego Mindstorms!
Readers of this blog will know that I'm a big fan of Lego, both the products and the company's Long Tailish way of tapping its consumers to design new products and share their own creations.
So I was really excited to hear that after five years, Lego is coming out with a new version of Mindstorms, the geeks' favorite programmable robot construction set. The new version, which was announced this evening at CES, is called Mindstorms NXT. It has a 32-bit processor, proper servo motors, new sensors (including color vision and hearing) and bluetooth connectivity so it can be controlled by a cellphone.
But what's really cool about the new Mindstorms is that they're a collaboration between Lego's engineers and some of the fans who run the very active Lego community projects built around open-source versions of its software. Lego used one of the fan-designed sensors and asked other fans to help design some of the software used to program the Mindstorms.
Someday business schools will use this as a case study in applying Web 2.0 peer-production techniques to traditional product innovation. In the meantime, you can read all about it in the cover story from next month's Wired, which we've released early as a sneak preview.
What a cool product! Hooray for products that ask the consumer to use their brain :)
Posted by: Narnia Nerd | January 05, 2006 at 09:20 AM
Regarding whether b-schools will recognize the value of the customer in the innovative process (New Lego Mindstorms!), we already do. Some of the groundbreaking work on this was conducted by Professor Eric Von Hippel, see his recent book "Democratizing Innovation" from MIT Press.
It is cool though, isn't it!
Posted by: James Hayton | January 06, 2006 at 08:40 AM
And I see in my trackbacks that the Sloan Business School at MIT will be doing the same this semester: http://spoudaiospaizen.net/archives/2006/01/lego-discovers-users-can-innovate/
Posted by: Chris Anderson | January 06, 2006 at 08:52 AM
Have you read Democratizing Innovation by Prof Hippel of MIT?
Posted by: rags | February 03, 2006 at 08:31 PM
I can vouch for the B-school embrace as well. I'm a JD-MBA candidate at Kellogg and Northwestern Law, and I'm currently writing a case study on the Mindstorm/LegOS phenomenon, the co-creation of value with customers, and the corresponding licensing issues (e.g. Lego's inclusion of a "right to hack") through the prism of peer-based production. If anyone would like to discuss further, please email!!
Posted by: Aubrey Cattell | March 08, 2006 at 11:37 PM
hey. i was put in a competition dealin with lego mindstorms stuff. has neone done this event, or tell me wut you have to do in it? alright i made the first post in here too, woooo!
[URL=http://mp3djay.com]djay[/URL]
Posted by: dj | March 23, 2006 at 02:56 AM
Hi Chris, we just gave you 'something' at M3 after your discussion panel - You might enjoy this video we produced for Coolhunting.com about Mindstorms back in January.
Here is the link
http://www.coolhunting.com/video/archives/2006/01/ces_2.php
Cheers!
Posted by: m ss ng p eces | March 29, 2006 at 07:27 AM
you’re in the minority
Posted by: san | May 20, 2007 at 02:10 AM