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.

Comments

[Narnia Nerd]

What a cool product! Hooray for products that ask the consumer to use their brain :)

[James Hayton]

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!

[Chris Anderson]

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/

[rags]

Have you read Democratizing Innovation by Prof Hippel of MIT?

[Aubrey Cattell]

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!!

[dj]

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]

[m ss ng p eces]

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!

[san]

you’re in the minority

[wii spiele]

I haven't seen the new challenge yet, all the other challenges were launched on the 1st day of the month, hope i will get the chance to see it in the near future....

[jeu en ligne]

Looks pretty good...

Big fan of the "old" NXT. I hope there will be a lot of new sensors available for this model (and that the old ones are backwards compatible ofcourse).

I wonder what the price will be here in the Netherlands

[gifts for men]

I think that it is perfectly fine to have no changes to the brain of the robot. It doesnt really need any. I can store plenty of programs on it so I dont care to complain about memory. If it does get filled up I can just save it to the comp. I of course am a hardcore nxt fan.I already have two NXTs so I would love to have a third :) I just need to save my money. I would hope that the color sensor is also a light sensor but im sure it can at least measure ambeint lighting. What happened to the sound sensor? I cant wait for it to happen.