I just had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Soren Lund present at the PharmaBrand Summit in Monaco.  He is the Senior Marketing Director of Product and Marketing Development at the Lego Group.  He told the amazing story about how Lego markets their product and leverages the power of their user community to create innovation and growth.  It prompted me to search the blogosphere for other stories about Lego, and I can see that the company is quite popular.  Blogging Innovation, Endless Innovation, Stefan Lindgard, and various others have written useful blog posts about Lego..

I start with a component list to use the first four of the S.I.T. tools:

Using this list, I manipulate the product by applying a tool.  This turns it into a “virtual product.”   I use “Function-Follows-Form” to work backwards and think of potential uses and benefits for the “weird” form created by the tool.  Here are some ideas generated very quickly with S.I.T.:

1.    SUBTRACTION:  “Remove a component.”  Let’s remove the base, so that we have only the posts and the tubes remaining.  Potential benefit is to use the remaining structure as a connecting rod to other full bricks.  This gives the builder more options and more freedom to create.

2.    MULTIPLICATION:  “Create copies of a component but change them in some way.”  I selected the posts and made additional copies of them but placed them on the side of the brick in addition to the ones already on top.  This would allow the side posts to be connected to other sideways-oriented bricks, thus creating more building options.

3.    DIVISION:  “Divide a component or the product, either physically, functionally, or preserving.”  For this exercise, I selected the product itself, and I divided it in half, and I kept the halves connected with a hinge.  This allows the build to use bricks in situations where parts of the object need to hinge. This would include obvious things like doors, but it would give the builder more creative freedom if some parts of the object could “fold” at the hinge.

4.    TASK UNIFICATION:  “Assign an additional job to an existing resource.”  I selected the tubes located underneath and inside the brick.  The additional “job” is to make a noise, perhaps a clicking sound if the brick is placed correctly into the next brick.  Or perhaps it makes a sound when the brick is placed into the next brick according to the instructions.  The brick essentially has a training element to it, letting users know when they have done something correctly or incorrectly.