The Path of Symbiosis Between Community and Enterprise as Seen from the Rise of LEGO

In the Web3 space, the metaphor of Lego is ubiquitous. People compare DeFi to financial Legos, DAOs to organizational Legos, and in the future, there may be various vertical Lego metaphors such as commercial Legos. This metaphor is popular because Web3 products often combine with each other, much like the creative assembly of Lego bricks.

However, composability is not the only insight that Lego gives us. We often overlook a fact: mere composability is not enough; innovation does not arise out of thin air; an open and inclusive community is crucial for stimulating innovation.

With the mutual support of the company and the community, LEGO has risen from the brink of bankruptcy over the past 20 years to become a leader in the global toy industry. This story demonstrates the importance of positive community engagement and provides a reference for how to achieve this goal. LEGO's case is not only worth learning from for traditional enterprises but also offers significant inspiration for the Web3 world.

Half-hearted - The First Close Contact with the Community

Since its founding in 1932, LEGO has dominated the toy market. However, by the 1990s, with the rise of technological products such as game consoles and music players, children gradually lost interest in LEGO block toys. Sales continued to decline, and in the fiscal year 1998, LEGO experienced its first loss in history.

In the face of this decline, LEGO has also made efforts. To regain the interest of children, LEGO's R&D department developed several new products in the late 1990s, including a set called Mindstorms. It includes a robot controller, three motors, three sensors, over 700 building blocks, and software for programming the controller. LEGO was originally designed for children aged middle to high, but it soon discovered that 70% of sales came from adults, and they purchased these kits for their own use.

The situation quickly spiraled out of control. First, a Stanford University student successfully reverse-engineered the brainstorming software, and within weeks, hackers from around the world began cracking the toolkit, creating programs more complex than the original LEGO, allowing enthusiasts to fully unleash their creativity.

The traditionally closed-minded and arrogant LEGO company has a persistent pursuit of quality, firmly believing that "only what LEGO makes is the best." The community's hacking activities have made the LEGO legal department very anxious, and they plan to take legal action.

But LEGO hesitated for a long time. On one hand, the lawsuit would be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive; on the other hand, the brainstorming team held a different opinion, believing that everyone was cracking it because they loved the product. After a long discussion, LEGO ultimately decided to abandon the lawsuit.

So both parties began to collaborate. To nurture this community, LEGO established an official forum and added a "right to crack" clause in the end-user license agreement of the brainstorming.

The results are delightful. Whether it's the official LEGO forum or community-built websites, they are extremely popular, with fans around the world creating hundreds of pages to showcase new inventions and provide detailed tutorials. Publishers have begun releasing LEGO robotics programming tutorials, some startups have started producing and selling compatible Brainstorm sensors and other hardware, and community members have organized robotics competitions. Almost overnight, an ecosystem formed around Brainstorm. The support from the community ecosystem has attracted a large number of new users, leading to products selling out, to the extent that they were out of stock before Christmas. For the first time, LEGO experienced the power of community participation.

Embracing Fully - Community as a Core Strategy

Most of the products developed in the chaos of the 1990s ultimately ended in failure, nearly dragging down LEGO, with multiple product lines being shut down. Despite the brainstorming gathering a lot of community support, the old generation of LEGO management lacked sufficient enthusiasm for this product and its community, leading to the disbandment of the brainstorming team in 2001 and the cessation of product updates.

In 2004, during a crisis, Lego appointed Jørgen Vig Knudstorp as CEO, which gave the company an opportunity to reflect on its strategy, especially the value of the company's relationship with the community. The new CEO quickly came to the conclusion - embrace the community.

"We believe that innovation will come from dialogue with the community," said Jørgen Vig Knudstorp.

Although the brainstorming product has stopped being updated, the community's enthusiasm for it has not waned. The number of participants in the brainstorming competition has grown from thousands initially to 50,000 in 2004. Therefore, the new CEO has decided to restart this series and hopes to invite the most active supporters in the community to co-create.

Years later, when we look back at this history, we find that LEGO had no deeper feelings for the community at that time. In fact, most of the internal members of the company did not understand or support the idea of inviting community members to co-create. The new CEO ultimately convinced everyone with a few practical reasons:

1. Insights from community enthusiasts can enhance the success rate of products.

2. Inviting community participation can build better consumer trust.

3. Inviting the community to collaboratively design the product itself has strong news value and may be reported by various media, thereby saving promotional costs.

4. The community will also spontaneously participate in publicity.

In short, it can increase sales while saving money.

Of course, the challenges are not small. How to select the right people from the community? How to ensure the direction does not go off track? How to maintain confidentiality? How to eliminate biases among internal company members towards community collaboration? But in the end, LEGO overcame all these difficulties and selected four of the most enthusiastic elite users from the community to participate in co-creation. The new version of Brainstorm was released in 2006 and achieved great success. This is the classic Brainstorm NXT series.

Sales growth is not the only benefit; Lego has since firmly believed in the power of community, leading to a major strategic shift for the company. Starting with an initial elite team of four participating in the design, Lego began to build a pyramid system where different community enthusiasts were divided into different levels, with the standard being their contribution to the product, such as designing new gameplay or discovering bugs. Community involvement has also expanded from brainstorming sets to more products, such as modifications of the classic train series.

In 2006, an architect named Tucker built the Chicago landmark Sears Tower using LEGO bricks, attracting attention within the community. LEGO quickly took notice of this development and eventually reached an experimental collaboration with Tucker, providing bricks and brand licensing, while Tucker created and sold 1,250 sets of the Sears Tower. The Tuckers completed the production of 1,250 sets of bricks in their garage and delivered them to local souvenir shops in Chicago, selling half within just 10 days.

After the initial success of the experiment, Lego expanded the scale of the experiment, forming a temporary team within the company to complete tasks such as product packaging design and organizing production during their spare time. They produced 4,000 sets of trial products to send to more souvenir shops, which quickly sold out again. Ultimately, this set became an official product of Lego and soon developed into a series - the Lego Architecture series.

Starting from the Sears Tower, the LEGO Architecture series has expanded into dozens of globally popular products, achieving not only substantial sales but also attracting a large number of users who had never purchased LEGO toys before. Due to the high positioning of this series, which appears more like art pieces rather than children's toys, it has successfully entered many high-end retail channels.

As the relationship with the community becomes increasingly close, LEGO has also established a more complete community support system:

LEGO Ambassador Network: Each certified LEGO community has a quota for one ambassador, who gains direct communication channels with the company and establishes connections with other ambassadors worldwide to promote positive interactions between the community and LEGO.

LEGO Certified Experts: They are the most professional LEGO player entrepreneurs who turn their passion for LEGO bricks into a part of their business and collaborate with LEGO to promote the brand ecosystem.

LEGO Creativity: An original design community that encourages communication and collaboration among users to share and evaluate each other's designs. Designs that receive high support within the community may be produced as official LEGO products. Designers can not only gain honorary titles within the community but also receive 1% of sales as royalties.

LEGO World Building: An online creative platform that allows LEGO fans, content creators, and story enthusiasts to collaborate and co-create brand new LEGO worlds. Users can create original LEGO worlds, design various characters, storylines, and environments, and also participate in LEGO worlds created by others, discussing, modifying, and improving them together. Outstanding works emerging from the community will be included in the official product line and may even be developed into content in the form of animations, movies, TV series, and more.

BrickLink: A marketplace for buying and selling LEGO products, providing a community space for sharing tips and designs. It also offers free software called "Studio" for designing digital LEGO models. It was acquired by LEGO in 2019 and is now an important hub for innovation and collaboration.

Trust the community and share power with the community

The story between LEGO and the community is very rich, making it difficult to fully narrate in a single article. But now the story can come to a conclusion, and I believe this is enough to inspire people.

We are all familiar with the term "community." Various companies often mention community in different contexts. However, the fact is that most companies have never truly owned a community; the "community" referred to by companies often means the consumers who purchase their products. A community is a group of people who share common interests, goals, or values, and they connect, interact, and communicate with each other within a certain space, such as geographical location or online platforms. From this definition, a group composed solely of users or consumers clearly does not constitute a real community.

The ways and goals of building a consumer group and establishing a community are different. The former aims to expand scale as much as possible to increase sales. However, scale is not the primary goal pursued by a community. The goal of a community is to create closer connections among members and to generate more meaningful interactions. Without these, even a large community finds it difficult to generate real value.

The success of the Lego community has several key points:

1. LEGO's products and brand culture are widely loved by players around the world.

2. The excellent interoperability of LEGO bricks provides better support for creative combinations.

3. LEGO has formed a culture that respects, supports, and shares power with the community, and has executed this well through a series of projects.

When the community is effectively activated, there is an opportunity for community-driven innovation and adoption, which blurs the boundaries between producers and consumers. Consumers are no longer just consumers; they become producers, engaging in imaginative and unconventional production work, thus creating a win-win situation.

Consumers have also become owners. Although LEGO has not provided consumers with true ownership, it at least allows the community to feel, in their hearts, that they own the LEGO brand. Psychological ownership is as important as true ownership. In the Web3 world, the vast majority of projects have failed to establish effective communities, as these projects have not successfully attracted members with a sense of identity and built psychological ownership. In this case, all participants are investors or speculators; regardless of price fluctuations, they will leave. Take profits and look for the next; cut losses and form a rights protection group.

With the support of the community, the entire business ecosystem of LEGO has been fundamentally changed. Since 2004,