1. science
2. ecology

MARIE
TAILLARD
Associate Professor, Marketing, ESCP Europe Business
School, London, UK
YUN MI
ANTORINI
Community Strategist, LEGO Group, Denmark
CREATIVITY IN THE LEGO ECOSYSTEM
Creativity in
the LEGO Ecosystem
Marie Taillard and Yun Mi Antorini
Creativity resides at the very core of the LEGO experience. It
starts with the creativity of a single LEGO user playing with
LEGO bricks to express a mood or an idea, and may serve to
inspire others, driving more play, more creativity, and engage­
ment. Observers often point to the very active and valuable
work of LEGO fans supported by employees and managers
at LEGO Group, as an example of successful “co-creativity.”
Through this well documented network of relationships, we see
evidence of a veritable ecosystem composed of users, young
and old; parents; educators; employees; retailers; licensing
partners; journalists, and other observers, having developed
around the LEGO experience. An ecosystem in business, just
as in biology, functions as a self-reinforcing whole whose com­
ponents create value for each other through the relationships
that hold them together. In the case of the LEGO ecosystem, it
lives thanks to the work of its many members, and the strong
brand it has forged, but its structure has remained implicit
and undocumented as a whole. Our current research aims to
address this gap.
hold them together. We have recently embarked on a project
to uncover the Ecosystem as a whole, the elements that
constitute it and create value with and for each other, and
the value it generates for the LEGO users and the company
alike. In this project, one of our main objectives is to uncover
and thoroughly document the role of creativity throughout the
LEGO Ecosystem. It is our strong belief that the LEGO Group
is a particularly convincing model of an organization in which
creativity is at the very core of value creation. In this short
essay, we will explain how we understand the notion of
creativity in the context of the LEGO Ecosystem and how we
see creativity unfolding through the rich activities of its stake­
holders coming together as an Ecosystem.
Inside the LEGO Group, creativity drives product development,
design, and production. It also feeds the marketing efforts that
bring LEGO products to market, positioning them uniquely to
engage the experience of users and others in the Ecosystem.
Our current examination of the value creation processes within
the Ecosystem highlights the role of interactions between
different types of stakeholders as important drivers of crea­
tivity. We see this, for instance, very clearly in the variety of
online and offline exchanges between AFOLs (Adult Fans of
LEGO) who share their passion for their hobby, facilitate the
acquisition of hard-to-find LEGO elements, promote their
events and platforms, and support each other both in their
practices and in important life moments. Likewise, the inter­
actions between AFOLs and the LEGO Group are conducive to
creativity, for instance when new designs are selected on the
Ecosystems must constantly adapt to the broader environ­
ments in which they exist. In the business world, this requires
staying ahead of competition, sociological changes, economic
pressures, regulations, and other external factors. To remain
sustainable, the LEGO Ecosystem must be carefully nurtured
– valuable components, relationships, and interactions must
be preserved and renewed, and allowed to evolve with time.
This requires an excellent understanding of the Ecosystem
as a whole, of its components, and of the relationships that
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64
LEGO Cuusoo platform, when an AFOL’s LEGO model is shared on
the ReBrick site, and when LEGO elements are inventoried on
Brickset. Some of this creative work has been clearly documented
and analyzed in a longitudinal study of the LEGO Group’s inter­
actions with user communities (Antorini & Muñiz, 2013; Antorini,
Muñiz & Askildsen, 2012).
mechanisms of audiences and creators expressing and inter­
preting ideas, information, knowledge, practices via material
and socio-cultural affordances, resulting in the creation of
new artifacts (Glaveanu, 2010). As such, creativity is a com­
plex process whose psychological, social and cultural dimen­
sions facilitate, feed and reinforce each other. This is clearly
exemplified in the case of the LEGO Ecosystem. Users from
diverse cultures access, adapt, and integrate each others’
skills, motivations, resources, practices, and interests to create
new models, discover new ways to play and build, experiment
with new elements, and inspire each other in their LEGO
experience.
These types of interactions constitute the “meso-level” of
the ecosystem, the processes through which resources such
as knowledge, skills, passion, emotion, financial and human
resources, raw material, and such are shared by stakeholders.
For instance, a young child playing with LEGO bricks for the first
time observes his/her older brother build a funny car and then
goes on to build his/her own creation; an AFOL reads about
another fan’s model and offers supportive feedback; a LEGO
Community Engagement & Events employee requests clarification
from an AFOL Ambassador on how to best support fan organized
events. As resources are shared – accessed, adapted, and
integrated from one individual to another – creativity unfolds
through the natural adaptive and iterative process of inte­
gration: the more sharing, the more adapting, the more inte­
grating, the more creativity (Taillard, Glaveanu & Voyer, 2013).
Let’s exemplify the externalization and internalization process­
es inherent to creativity in greater detail. A young LEGO user
owns an extensive collection of LEGO bricks which he extern­
alizes by sharing it with friends during a playdate. Together, the
children imagine and build a new model out of the many sets
laid out in the playroom. One of the children internalizes this
new experience and learns how to mix different elements and
sets together, reinterpreting new ways of playing and building
along the way, and developing his/her own style as a user.
This process, repeated and shared over time and across space,
develops into more creativity at the same time as new
practices and cultural artifacts take shape. This analysis points
to the transition from the individual and psychological to the
social and cultural. This shift is clearly discussed and illustrated
in work by Schau, Muñiz and Arnould who point to the complex
structure of cultural practices as value creating drivers (Schau,
It is the amazing capacity of the human mind in its full
social and cultural capacity that allows creativity to unfold in
this rich context around the shared focus, interest or passion
on LEGO products and the LEGO experience. According to
the social psychologist, Vlad Glaveanu, creativity is a process
that operates through the internalization and externalization
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65
Muniz & Arnould, 2009). Implicit in their proposed typology of
practices are the micro-level externalization/internalization
processes, such as the ones documented in the LEGO Eco­
system, that allow creativity to unfold and flourish one
individual, one interaction, one idea at a time.
The LEGO Ecosystem provides an excellent observation ground
for the power of creativity in creating value for all stakeholders.
The Ecosystem model itself allows a careful analysis of the
role of different stakeholders and their relationships and
interactions. By focusing on these different dimensions,
we are working to document the specific points of creative
resource exchange and to identify the features of those most
likely to result in collective and cultural level creativity. In
other words, we are identifying those types of exchanges, their
participants, and the material affordances and contexts that
enable them, that are most conducive to greater creativity
over time. This in turn will allow a more careful nurturing and
support of the platforms, channels, events, and other touch
points throughout the Ecosystem in order to support and en­
courage the externalization and internalization processes that
are so critical to collective creativity. However, make no mis­
take: ecosystems and the creativity they generate are never
candidates for quick “in and out” interventions, but rather
the result of painstaking and long-term work. In an article on
collec­tive consumer innovation, Kozinets, Hemetsberger and
Schau point to the effect of time and commitment on the acti­
vities of community members in weaving a “complex social and
cultural fabric” (Kozinets, Hemetsberger & Schau, 2008). Our
goal in researching and analyzing the Ecosystem is to find ways
to facilitate and nurture the weaving processes with great
respect for their spontaneity and complexity and the pain­
staking work and efforts that they represent.
REFERENCES
Antorini, Y.M. & Muñiz, A.M. (2013), ‘The Benefits and Challenges of Collaborating
with User Communities’, Research - Technology Management, vol. 56, no. 3, pp.
21-8.
Antorini, Y.M., Muñiz, A.M. & Askildsen, T. (2012), ‘Collaborating With Customer
Communities: Lessons From the Lego Group’, MIT Sloan Management Review
(Spring).
Glaveanu, V. (2010), ‘Creativity As Cultural Participation’, Journal for the Theory of
Social Behaviour, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 48-67.
Kozinets, R.V., Hemetsberger, A. & Schau, H.J. (2008), ‘The Wisdom of Consumer
Crowds: Collective Innovation in the Age of Networked Marketing’, Journal of Macromarketing, vol. 28, pp. 339-54.
Schau, H., Muniz, A.M. & Arnould, E. (2009), ‘How Brand Community Practices Crea­
te Value’, Journal of Marketing, vol. 73 no. 5, pp. 30-51.
Taillard, M., Glaveanu, V. & Voyer, B. (2013), ‘The Role of Consumer Creativity in
the Value Creation Process: A Conceptual Framework’, Proceedings of the European
Marketing Academy (EMAC).
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