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
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).
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: