Regarding intellectual property management, LEGO may seem to suffer from some form of personality disorder. Over the years, the company has indeed been oscillating between very open and very closed attitudes.
On the “open side”, LEGO appears nowadays as a champion of crowd-sourcing and of user-based innovation. LEGO’s recent Cuusoo project is a nice example of crowd-sourcing design, whereby the ‘crowd’ (i.e., anyone) is invited to submit LEGO models that the company may later consider (see other examples of crowd-sourcing designs in this Digitopoly post). This new initiative follows previous similar projects, like LEGO Factory (launched in 2005 and now dubbed ‘DESIGNbyME’).
