Friday, May 29, 2015

Anyone familiar with the LEGO Serious Play program?

Anyone familiar with the LEGO Serious Play program? It looks interesting, but it'd be useful to have a comparison between this and other innovation-inspiring corporate workshop formats that are available out there.
http://www.lego.com/en-us/seriousplay

4 comments:

  1. Another great source is my former McKinsey Toronto colleague Shona Brown, who wrote the most highly cited literature review of the ways companies innovate in product with her PhD supervisor Kathleen Eisenhardt  http://www.jstor.org/stable/258850?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents  She later implemented these as SVP Business Operations Google during their first decade of growth, and was fairly effective in scaling them from their original Search product    
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65s4G1et2fY
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8ldgBiYKd8

    Our other former McK Toronto colleague Patrick Pichette also has lots of good material up on financing innovation and scaling operations, which he's done as CFO Google (he joined 2001 as EVP Planning and Performance Management)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4br60q_wCyg
    http://fortune.com/video/2015/03/11/can-google-still-be-a-startup/
    http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/corporate_finance/googles_cfo_on_growth_capital_structure_and_leadership

    Worth noting incidentally that all this Lego innovation revival after 82 years of life happened under another ex-McK guy, CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp. McK has a great growth practice, and a lot of the ideas I've seen implemented by Patrick and Jorgen seem related to that http://www.mckinsey.com/features/growth. I don't know him personally but he is pretty awesome, as the song goes
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP7fQ7WmGpw
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/b/5ade11ae-1c79-4fbc-847a-156c3161e771
    http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xd3zdc_jorgen-vig-knudstorp-lego-ceo-man-w_webcam

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  2. Yep, I've cited Brown & Eisenhardt (1995) in several of my earlier papers. Thanks for all those suggestions.

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  3. Craig Froehle yep, it was a shock citing Shona in my own PhD research (1999-2001) on product innovation in ARM's microprocessor ecosystem, and realizing I'd actually worked with her in Toronto. She's got lots more material up
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFKtkdbaX5M
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHioPWTERJA

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Now I'm doubly intrigued!

Now I'm doubly intrigued!