What happens when one of the fastest moving innovators in cocreation in business gets timecapsuled into a 2004 paper citation? This presentation discusses three research agenda items as a "Where to next?" for marketing researchers interested in taking a critical eye to how Lego is used as a talismanic invocation of cocreation, and what more there is to learn from the complexity of the Lego consumption experience.

1. Questioning the Lego
Cocreation Talisman
DR STEPHEN DANN, SENIOR LECTURER, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
THAT LEGO GUY, THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS ANZMAC WEBMASTER
STEPHEN.DANN@ANU.EDU.AU | @STEPHENDANN

2. All the world’s a service,
And all the men and women merely services actors
They have their operants and their operands
And one person in their time co-creates many value offers
So so many apologies. All apologies

3. Research Motivation

4. The Lego Cocreation Story
 The Backstory
 From 2003 to today
 The Contemporary Challenge
 Three Questions
 The Observational Data
 Operant, Operand, Opera

5. This is a Lego Mind Storm
 Lego Robotic
 It was okay
 Adult Fans of Lego (AFOL)
 Rewrote the code, Made it better
 Nearly met with a fate worse than Lawyers
 Lego decided to adopt the community
 Voila! Cocreation

6. This is Prahalad & Ramaswamy (2003)
Prahalad, C. K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2003). The new frontier of experience innovation. MIT Sloan management review, 44(4), 12-19.

7. This is a talisman
 charms are material objects believed to
embody “supernatural” power that can aid
or protect the owner. Good luck charms
are standard equipment for some
ballplayers. These include a wide
assortment of objects from coins, chains,
and crucifixes to a favorite baseball hat.
 Gmelch, G. (1971). Baseball magic. Trans-
action, 8(8), 39-41.

8. This is Prahalad & Ramaswamy (2004)
Prahalad, C. K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2004). Co-creation experiences: The next practice in value creation. Journal of interactive marketing, 18(3), 5-14.

9. What leads to today
 A comprehensive review of the marketing identified journals
 1505 Marketing category in the Australian Business Dean’s Council Journal ranking list
(ABDC 2016),
 141 journals
 Each journal was searched by the keyword Lego®,
 215 useable papers after rejecting false positive matches (eg “allegorical”).
 83 papers apply cocreation as a factor featuring Lego

10. Digging the Cocreation
 83 papers
 63 Papers: cocreated product, outcome, or
experience.
 20 Papers: Prahalah and Ramaswamy
(2004) citation
 Patient Zero of Mindstorms case studies
 20 papers single word cite Mindstorms

11. A problem emerges
 Do we have a heuristic for cocreation community
consultation?
 Prahalah and Ramaswamy (2004) citation
 Does it still hold, in the context that Lego was used in
pre-2003?
 RQ1: Validation of Lego® Mindstorms as the invocation
of cocreation success[1].
[1] Mindstorm EV3 creeps me out.

12. A question
 Prahalad & Ramaswamy (2003)
established the conditions
 Experience environment
 Continuity
 Transformability
 Customer Contribution
 Competence
 Innovation

13. Mass customisation versus Co creation
 Lego as mass customisation
 users are limited to a selection of options
from a pre-set menu
 controlled co-creation from fixed menu
versus open engagement from previous
sold parts.
Endo and Kincade 2008; Franke and Schreier 2008; Xia and Rajagopalan 2009).

14. Lego Ideas : A Cocreation Station?

15. The Ideas Rule Set

16. Research Agenda
Is the Lego® brick
building experience
classifiable as mass
customisation,
cocreation, or a
combination of forms?

17. Historical Lego® cocreation tools
 Cooke and Buckley (2008)
 500 piece online customisation tool dubbed
“Lego® Factory”
 (Dong and Sivakumar 2017).
 Lego® Ideas platform
 Present
 He et al (2017)
 “Lego® Hobby Train”
 limited release, sold out, and removed from offer.

18. Research Agenda
Replication and further
research is need to
review Lego®’s
contemporary
community
engagement
cocreation strategy

19. Researcher Advisory Note: Move Fast

20. Lego bricks: Operand or Operant?

21. Continuity and Transformation
 Lego Serious Play:
 “Builder owns the meaning of the model, no
meaning is retained in the bricks”
 Lego Mindstorms:
 Community engagement and transformation
 Lego Ideas Project:
 Mass customisation?
 Lego Creativity Kits:
 Embedded story telling / meaning making
 Lego Architecture:
 Embedded Tourism?

22. The Lego Paradox
James 2006
cocreation through creative
construction
Mochon et al 2012
Akaka et al 2014,
Kravets and Sandikci 2014
open world of imagination
use / reuse / creative misuse
“make what you are told”

23. Research Phase
 Observational Data Collection
 Joy of being a practitioner
 An Inevitable Autoethnographic Part
 Lego Serious Play as B2B Cocreation
 Incoming:

24. Questions?