Lego: How to Web 2.0 a consumer products company

Chris Anderson
The Long Tail

April 20, 2006

Lego continues to impress: it's emerging as a surprising best-practice case study in how to extend Web 2.0 techniques to a traditional consumer products company. I write about Lego in the book, but today's news that they're going to open source the Mindstorm NXT software [ http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/lego_to_open_source_the_mindst.html ] is both further evidence of the company's smart strategy and an opportunity to do a quick roundup of Lego's Long Tail virtues:

• There's the huge online-only inventory [ http://shop.lego.com/ ], ranging from individual pieces to $300 superkits [ http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=10030 ].
• There's Lego Factory [ http://www.lego.com/eng/factory/ ], which combines mass customization with peer production, as I wrote about here [ http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2005/10/friday_fanboy_l.html ].
• There's the distributed innovation model that allowed passionate users [ http://mindstorms.lego.com/community/default.aspx ] to help design the new Mindstorm NXT [ http://mindstorms.lego.com/ ] robot construction kits. It was the subject of a Wired cover story [ http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,69946-0.html?tw=wn_tophead_1 ] in February.

O'Reilly reports that Lego has been selling 3,000 units a week in pre-orders in the US alone, making NXT a candidate for primetime mindshare in 2006. The kits ship on July 1.

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