After many months of planning and anticipation, this week Interactive Minds was honoured to host David Gram, the Marketing Director from LEGO Future Lab to Australia for our events in Brisbane and Melbourne.
David embarked on a huge journey from Denmark to join us for our events and to share his innovation and growth expertise with our network. And we weren’t left disappointed!
David gave a wonderful presentation, shared some amazing insights and left hundreds of people inspired to setup, improve or explore innovation in their organisations.
There have already been some great articles written – like this Marketing Mag one and one in the Australian Financial Review which provide great summaries of the event. Also check out our Tweet streams from the Brisbane or Melbourne events for individual tips.
Biggest Takeaways
The things that stayed with me most from David’s presentation were as follows:
- LEGO was voted as the most powerful brand for 2015. For a brand to be powerful it can’t do things that makes people hate it.
- Innovation is not a free flowing creative process. It works best with a defined structure, strong platform, knowing your mission and setting a framework within which to be creative. Otherwise there are lots of ideas and no direction.
- Adding money to an innovation project simply increases the stakeholders, the focus and the pressure to succeed. You want to keep projects small enough to fail and therefore they need to fly under the radar.
- Stick to your core offering and build your portfolio around it. A strong brand might be tempted to think they can build anything, but it may confuse your customers.
- Being innovative requires a fine balance between communicating with the core business and staying separate. Most of all it needs to be formulated on a relationship built on respect.
- An innovation lab is a great way to test projects that the core business is not ready to embrace.
- If an innovation lab focuses on delivering revenue it will become too short term focused and risk adverse. Rather they should focus their KPI’s on know-how and capabilities, inspiring the core business and validating new growth areas.
- Most companies can identify future disruptions. Their problem comes in their ability to appropriately respond.
Getting the basics right
After being part of these events, it's apparent that LEGO’s success in recent years has come from their unwavering focus on their mission, their defined product guidelines and the emphasis they put on understanding their customer. They have achieved so much for a family owned company that makes plastic bricks!
You're Invited!
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