# data[].attributes.body
Here is an articulate rebuttal to the feminist petition against Legos supposedly sexist "Friends" set.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lego Friends petition: why feminists should think twice before they sign | Hannah Betts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hannah Betts: Thousands have signed a petition against the new ‘sexist’ Lego Friends range – but is it ever right to police children’s play?

# data[].attributes.body
This is my son's reaction when I try to place "girl" Legos into the shopping cart.

# data[].attributes.body
My research has taken a bit of a new direction.  In watching one of my sources (LEGO a Brickumentary), I forgot that I read about LEGO being sexist (as in mostly marketing their products for boys) and then trying to rectify the issue but only making it worse by creating LEGO sets designed for girls.  I may add this aspect to one of my three research "wonderings."

# data[].attributes.body
Here is another resource that focuses on how Lego stays current.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Lego has managed with the core Lego brick experience to stay relevant throughout generations.

Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO of the Lego Group

Lego has cemented its place as the world's biggest toymaker after sales in 2015 leapt by 25 percent compared to 2014.

With seven boxes of Lego sold every second, 62 pieces for every person in the world, and little 'mini-figures' as they're known outumbering real people in the world, Lego has performed spectacularly in spite of the popularity of mobile phones and video games.

Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, the CEO of the Lego Group, joins Counting the Cost to discuss how Lego has managed to stay relevant in the digital age.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lego has managed with the core Lego brick experience to stay relevant throughout generations. Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO of the Lego Group Lego has cemented its place as the world's biggest toymaker after sales in 2015 leapt by 25 percent compared to 2014.

# data[].attributes.body
This is an interview with the author of Brick by Brick about how Lego stopped thinking outside of the box.  This might help reinforce information I find in the book.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Few toys have caught the imagination of children everywhere more than LEGOs - the multi-colored plastic blocks that can snap together to construct houses, castles, space ships or fantastical imaginary figures. The Danish company (whose name roughly translates to "play well") traces its roots to a failed carpenter named Ole Kirk Christiansen, who in 1932 decided to put his skills to work creating toys made of wood. In the late 1940s, Christiansen invested in the then-risky injection molding technology needed to make the plastic blocks. In the late 1950s, Ole Kirk's son, Godtfred, came up with the interlocking stud-and-tube design that made the company a household name.
But there is a side to the company's story that is rarely told, one that Wharton practice professor David Robertson says can serve as a guide to both the importance and the perils of innovation in today's global marketplace. In his new book, Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry, Robertson, who wrote the book with journalist Bill Breen, recounts how a binge of innovation almost bankrupted LEGO - and how the company brought itself back from the brink by returning to its roots.
An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: We're here today with Wharton practice professor David Robertson, author of the new book, Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry. David, thanks for being with us today.

David Robertson: Thanks for having me.

Knowledge@Wharton: I had a chance to read the book. The story of LEGO's transition from a small company that made wooden toys to a worldwide giant is pretty interesting. Could you briefly discuss its origins?

Robertson: Sure. It [started with] a failed carpenter in 1932. Denmark was in the midst of a recession like much of the world, and a carpenter named Ole Kirk Christiansen was having trouble getting the wood he needed to make furniture. So he took scraps of wood and made toys for kids, which actually did pretty well. He turned that into a business and started LEGO in 1932.

Knowledge@Wharton: Where did the iconic brick come from? How did he go from wooden toys to the plastic blocks that we all identify with LEGO?

Robertson: [Christiansen] made wooden toys for the first 15 years of the business. He has four young sons. His wife dies a year or two after he starts the business. He continues to grow and do well. And then in 1947, against the wishes of his now grown sons, he invests in this really risky technology called plastic injection molding and starts making plastic toys, which initially do pretty badly.

There are a lot of department stores who tell him that kids will never want toys made out of this cheap plastic stuff, that wooden toys are what kids will always want. But Christiansen experiments with different types of plastic toys. He builds some stackable, although not really interlocking, bricks, and then passes control of the company to his son, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, who experiments with different configurations and finally comes up with the interlocking brick with the studs and tubes, and patents that in 1958.

Along the way, Godtfred does something really interesting: He is talking to a department store owner from the major department store in Denmark, and the guy tells him, "What we need is not another toy, but a system of play. Something where if you buy a second set, you don't add to your toys, you multiply what's possible - these things can interlock and you can do more, much more. And as you buy more sets, the opportunities multiply."

Godtfred Kirk Christiansen goes back and looks at all the different products that LEGO is offering. He realizes that 90% of them don't fall in this category of a system of play, and that it is really only these stackable bricks that do. He makes a pretty big strategic decision to actually cut out 90% of his product inventory and focus on the brick. That's a big move, but it turned out to be pretty successful.

Knowledge@Wharton: I was really struck by how innovative it was for LEGO to create a system such that, if you buy a package of bricks, it fits with all of your other bricks, and it doesn't matter if you're combining pieces from a space set with pieces from a castle set, for example. What are some of the key decisions that LEGO leadership made in the company's early years?

Robertson: One of the early decisions that really made a huge difference was the development of the minifigure. Back in 1978, the first of these little LEGO people came out, and that really took the whole idea of a system of play to a new level. I have a picture in the book of three different, really popular sets from the mid-1970s. One is a family, and they stand about 10 bricks tall. Next to them is a train, which stands about eight bricks tall. There's no way the family could fit in the train. And then next to them is a house, which stands about five or six bricks tall. So the family towers over the house, like some 1950s monster movie. [LEGO introduced] some good toys in the 1970s, but they weren't at the same scale at all.

When LEGO comes out with the minifigure, they standardize all of the sets around that scale. They make the system of play even more of a system. That's when things really start to take off for the company. From 1978 through 1993, the company grew at 14% per year, every year, for 15 years, basically doubling in size every five years for 15 years. It's kind of a golden period in LEGO's history, where the company expanded into North America and other geographies. They explored different types of sets. They introduced theme sets around space, castles, pirates and Westerns. And everything worked for about 15 years.

Knowledge@Wharton: LEGO went through a decline in the 1990s and the 2000s. There are plenty of stories out there about companies that responded too late to changes that would significantly impact their business or how their customers lived. Is that what happened with LEGO, or was there something different going on?

Robertson: There were two phases in that decline, and one led to the other. The first one was from 1993 to 1998; LEGO went through this stagnant period where really it had reached the end of a natural growth cycle. There are only so many feet of toy space and so many toy stores around the world, and LEGO was on those shelves already....

LEGO tried to keep the growth going by tripling the number of new toys that it offered between 1993 and 1998, but sales didn't go anywhere. Cost, on the other hand - as you can imagine, if you triple your number of products without changing your sales, your costs go up, your profits go down and LEGO suffered the first loss in company history in 1998. So the company laid off 1,000 people. The grandson of the founder, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen [son of Godtfred and grandson of Ole Kirk Christiansen; Kristiansen's last name was misspelled with a "k" instead of a "ch" on his birth certificate], who has now been leading the company for 20 years, steps aside. He says, "Maybe I'm not the right person to lead this company in the next generation."

He brings in a turnaround expert, and that guy finishes the layoff. His name is Poul Plougmann, and he realizes that LEGO is actually operating in a very different world than it was just 10 years before. He goes out and he starts looking at the market and finds that kids are getting older [at a] younger [age], that the whole market for toys has changed with companies like Toys R Us and Walmart being much more sophisticated, much more powerful, in terms of their market power. Lastly, a lot of other toys had switched their production to China, and so their toys, the other toys you could buy for your kids [besides LEGOs], were getting cheaper. On the other hand, the Danish kroner had increased in value against the dollar, and LEGOs were still being made in Denmark. So LEGOs were getting more expensive while other toys were getting less expensive, kind of a double hit. The company realized that it really needed to do something different. And that's when they embarked on this experiment with innovation.

Knowledge@Wharton: When the company begins its push for innovation, it introduces a lot of what sounds like "can't miss" products, including collaborations with the creators of Star Wars and the Harry Potter books. There was also some really innovative work going on that involved computerizing LEGO's trademark blocks and putting them into a virtual world. But the company still finds itself in deep financial trouble - why is that? What was leadership missing when they were embarking on this campaign of innovation? Do you think they could have seen the problems if they had been paying attention to different things?

Robertson: The short answer to that question is that they lost control of the innovation. They tried to innovate in lots of different ways, and they did. They came out with a lot of different toys. Some of those toys were hits like LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Harry Potter and Bionicle. There were a couple of really big hits, and in a way, those were really dangerous for LEGO because [they created] a thick layer of cosmetics that hid a pretty ugly business underneath.

There was a toy called Explore that was a line of toys for toddlers, and they were actually pretty good toys, just from my point of view. But they weren't very LEGO-y. They didn't have much construction as part of the toy. LEGO tried to listen to its customers, which you're supposed to do, and they came out with a line of toys called Jack Stone, which was this minifigure crossed with G.I. Joe, this hero that would save the day. The thing is, these toys were really built for that child who didn't like LEGO, which was the majority of kids, the company found from one study. These toys would snap together in about 10 minutes and the kids could start playing.

But a lot of us as parents, the reason we buy LEGO for our kids - and we may not admit it to ourselves - it's that rainy Sunday afternoon when the kids are driving us nuts and we want a couple hours of quiet, so we get the LEGO set. Well, if you bought the Jack Stone set, you would have 10 minutes and then the kids are running around screaming again. So it drove away some of the fans of the brand.

Lastly, one of the experiments that LEGO did during that time was something called Galidor, a huge, expensive failure. It was a buildable action figure, which there was a big market for. What the company tried to do is something that we suggest here still at Wharton: To try and create a full spectrum of innovation, a whole set of complementary innovations that will reinforce each other. Galidor wasn't just a toy; it had electronics in it that you could play games in. It had an accompanying video game. It had a TV show that would tell kids the story behind the toy. They did all kinds of marketing so there would be Galidor toys in McDonald's Happy Meals and lots of different innovations that would all build to create this unbeatable offer in the market.

But LEGO kind of got away from what it knew how to do. The TV show, for example, was so bad. And I looked this up on IMDB: Nobody who ever acted in it acted in anything ever again. It destroyed careers. It was just stunningly bad because LEGO drove that show and really didn't know how to do that.

It took them a while to figure all this stuff out. The problem was that they had these successes from Star Wars and Harry Potter, but those successes were really only successful in years in which there was a movie. So there was a Star Wars movie in 1999 and 2002. There was a Harry Potter movie in 2001 and 2002. There was no movie from either franchise in 2003 or the first half of 2004. Sales of those two toys fall off a cliff, and LEGO is left with one profitable product, Bionicle. Everything else is losing money, and LEGO is a fixed cost business. So if you get above a certain level, then you start making money very fast. If you fall below a certain level, you start losing money very fast. And LEGO started losing money very fast in 2003.

Knowledge@Wharton: That would be the time that I would think a lot of firms would have completely abandoned an innovation strategy and said, "We don't have the money; we don't have the time to innovate. We have to concentrate on survival." But LEGO didn't really do that. What did it do, and what do you think the lesson is there for other firms?

Robertson: Well, they really had no choice. They had to innovate. They're in a market that is a vicious global competition, with fickle customers who have rapidly changing tastes. If you're in the toy industry, like in many industries, you have to renew your product line every year or two. And so LEGO had no choice but to innovate.

But they cut it way back. What they realized is that these ideas about how you should innovate, all of the things that drove them from 1999 to 2003, had driven them out of control. The "out of the box" thinking almost put them out of business. What they did after 2003 is they kind of went back in the box. They went back to the brick, and they focused more on the police stations and the fire trucks and the other things that not only were what their fans wanted, but were also pretty profitable for them. When they went back in the box, they found that there was a lot of money in the box and that fans returned to the brand.

Knowledge@Wharton: The book and LEGO's story seem to some extent to be a cautionary tale about blindly following this textbook map for innovation that a lot of people talk about. But how do you think companies should use those principles when trying to develop a strategy for themselves? How could LEGO have looked at this differently at the beginning in order to have a better outcome, at least initially?

Robertson: In the book, we talk about the seven truths of innovation, or the seven deadly truths, because they almost killed LEGO. The problem was not that they don't work; the problem is that they do. LEGO boosted innovation so much that it lost control of innovation. So there are a couple of lessons in the book, the big one being: Don't do what LEGO did. Almost going out of business, almost going into bankruptcy is marvelous for focusing attention, but it's not really necessary and not what we would advise at all in terms of how you should approach this.

Instead, what to take away from LEGO is that it's not enough just to boost innovation. As you boost the amount of creativity and innovation, you've also got to boost the amount of focus and control. The reason I decided to devote a book to the LEGO story is I think they are wonderful at achieving that balance between giving their people the space to be creative, but the direction and focus to deliver profitable innovation. The big difference between LEGO now versus LEGO in 2001 and 2002 is that back in 2001, if you were a LEGO designer you would have been told: "Create a great toy. Do something really cool. Do something that's really going to excite kids." And what you got was toys that weren't very LEGO-y, toys that weren't very profitable and, occasionally, a big win.

Now if you go to work for LEGO, it's very likely you will be told: "Work on a great police station. Work on a great fire truck. Give us a great LEGO race car. And by the way, don't use any kind of piece or shape that you want or color that you want. Use this very limited palette of pieces. Because we can use these pieces in lots of different sets and make them in very high volume and make a lot of profit from every set that you make. We're going to be pretty much guaranteed of that because we have a limited platform that we work from, a limited system of play."

What they found is that a lot of the designers who were hired in 1999 and 2000 weren't happy with the new LEGO. They didn't like that narrowing of the freedom. But on the other hand, there were some designers who really liked the fact that, number one, if they're working on a toy it was very likely that [it] would get into the hands of kids. And number two, they're working for a company that was profitable and growing, and those toys would be around and that company would be around and their jobs would be around in a couple of years. So it's a different kind of creativity, and it's a different kind of reward. But I would argue it's just as great a creative challenge.

Knowledge@Wharton: Even more so, I would think.

Robertson: Yes. If what you're looking for is how to do the next big industry-changing innovation, the next big disruptive, blue ocean innovation, I don't know that LEGO is a great model. But if what you're looking for is how to make a lot of money doing lots of small innovations, lots of small ideas, but integrating them really well and focusing them very well on what your customers want and need, then LEGO is a great model. And the results show it. LEGO has been growing sales at 24% per year every year for the past five years and growing profits at 40% per year every year for the last five years. So they're doing something right.

Knowledge@Wharton: It seemed like before, in a way, LEGO leadership was almost saying, "We have this niche of loyal customers, but now we have to get those people who aren't fans." It seems now like they have embraced that niche a bit, making things for the people who are very devoted LEGO fans who stay that way, even after they become adults.

Robertson: Yes, and they do. They're focusing on their niche. But they are moving out. In the book, we talk about LEGO games where they moved from the toy shelf to the game shelf pretty successfully and created these games that you build like LEGO and you can rebuild each time you play. It comes with directions, not just for the first time you play, but the second, third, fourth time as you snap different faces off the dice and put different faces on. The game plays differently each time. They also just came out with a LEGO Friends line, which is LEGO for girls. That has been a little controversial, but very successful in terms of bottom line profitability.

Knowledge@Wharton: You also make the point in the book that despite this product being pretty ubiquitous, at least for anyone who has kids and probably even for a lot of people who don't, that LEGO isn't often mentioned in articles about the world's most innovative companies. It's not a company that immediately comes to mind when there is talk of innovation. Why do you think that is?

Robertson: I was surprised by that, too. If you look at Fast Company, which has a list of the most innovative companies, if you look at Businessweek, if you look at the Technology Review magazine that comes out of MIT, they have an annual list of the most innovative companies in the world, and LEGO has never made the top 50 of any of those lists. But here is a company that is dominating its industry [despite] vicious global competition and fickle customers. And they have lost the patent. The patents for the LEGO brick were issued in 1958 and have all expired, so anybody can make a LEGO brick, and a half a dozen companies do and sell it for much less than LEGO does. Our strategy colleagues tell us that this is a recipe for [disaster], and yet LEGO is making great profits and doing tremendously well. It's a wonderful story, and that's another reason why I wanted to tell it in the book. I think it is this great untold story.

Knowledge@Wharton: Finally, you spent a lot of time with LEGO executives and at LEGO headquarters while you were researching this book. What do you think it is about the LEGO brick that has made it so ubiquitous, such an intrinsic part of a lot of people's childhoods? What's helped it endure despite the advent of video games and iPods and tablets?

Robertson: I think there are two reasons why the LEGO brick has been so successful. There is the point of view from the parents and the point of view from the kids. From the point of view of the kids, I think what LEGO learned from Star Wars is the power of the story. If you have this rich world with a story that plays out in that world, kids love to build that world and then play the story out in that world with their little minifigures and then rebuild it and try things in different ways. LEGO has learned to tell stories around the bricks, I think, very well.

From the parents' point of view, I'm convinced that investing in LEGO is great for your kids' ability to support you when you're older. It teaches those creative building skills and 3D visualization and construction skills, and I think that it clicks a switch in kids. Even if they move away from the brand, which I think many kids do when they are teenagers and it's no longer cool to play with LEGO, that switch stays clicked. I think it's fundamentally good for kids. As you can imagine, my kids did not suffer from a lack of LEGO.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How LEGO Stopped Thinking Outside the Box and Innovated Inside the Brick - Knowledge@Wharton

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LEGO has built a global empire and become a household name, thanks to the interlocking bricks that its founders developed half a century ago. But the company almost went belly up in the early 2000s due to an innovation binge that took it too far away from what LEGO did best.

# data[].attributes.body
This is an article that focuses on how Lego stays relevant thanks to the Lego movie.  This may help with one of my supporting aspects of my paper.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Lego is determined to stay relevant to today's tech-savvy children through online video and its "fantastically successful" movie franchise, the Danish toymaker's CEO told CNBC Wednesday.

Lego Group Wednesday reported a double-digit growth in global sales for 2014, up by 15 percent on last year, together with a 7 billion Danish krone ($1.48 billion) net profit, an increase of 16 percent since 2013.

Read More Lego tweet, Bieber,'American Sniper'

Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO of Lego told CNBC's Worldwide Exchange that it is "still a lot of fun for children to create things" and they are "highly focused on our core physical lego building experience."

Justin Tallis | AFP | Getty Images

Despite the rise in children's interest towards technology, Knudstorp remained focused on keeping up to date.

"We're one of the most-watched brands on YouTube. We have a collaboration with Warner Brothers, with the fantastically successful 'Lego Movie' last year," he told CNBC

However, in terms of social media, The Lego Group's CEO maintains that its company is "treading very carefully" as there are restrictions when it comes to marketing towards children.

Discussing the results, Louise Cooper, a chartered financial analyst at CooperCity told CNBC via email that "since the arrival of CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, Lego has been revolutionised. But this is the tenth consecutive year of growth with little sign of a slowdown. 12% top line growth in a deflationary world is impressive, even more so given the size of the company."

Read More Kids still want to play with Lego despite tech: CFO

Russian market?

With Russia struggling against the decline in its currency and the geopolitical tensions with Ukraine and the West; Knudstorp admitted that they were seeing an impact in terms of the decline of the ruble but it hadn't impacted sales in the local Russian market.

The group had seen "very nice growth in Russia over the past year, around 35 to 40 percent, and I think it reflects the enormous strength the Lego brand has with the average Russian middle income consumer," Knudstorp added.

Read More Ukraine PM to Russia: 'Get out of our land'

Lego gets a feminine side

In March 2012, the Lego Group launched its Lego with Friends product line, targeted towards the young female audience.

Knudstorp admitted that Lego's female-orientated products had failed to capture the market in the past, but added that Lego with Friends had now "become a global blockbuster for us."

The annual results come in shortly after Lego was named as the world's most powerful brand of 2015, taking the crown from luxury car company Ferrari, in the Brand Strength Index, by Brand Finance, an asset valuation consultancy.

One of the main reasons for the brand's results was down to the commercial success and international praise from its 2014 film 'The Lego Movie,' which has grossed more than $468.7 million worldwide so far, according to Box Office Mojo.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lego is determined to stay relevant to today's tech-savvy children through online video and its "fantastically successful" movie franchise, the Danish toymaker's CEO told CNBC Wednesday. Lego Group Wednesday reported a double-digit growth in global sales for 2014, up by 15 percent on last year, together with a 7 billion Danish krone ($1.48 billion) net profit, an increase of 16 percent since 2013.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a very in-detph article.  Might be useful for my introduction or conclusion. Maybe offer some supporting evidence. Resource #3.

# data[].attributes.body
This program looks into why Legos are so expensive AND why they are so popular.  This looks at how Lego is crushing the competition (Mega Blocks)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I went to Toys R Us recently to buy my son a Lego set for Hanukkah. Did you know a small box of Legos costs $60? Sixty bucks for 102 plastic blocks!

In fact, I learned, Lego sets can sell for thousands of dollars. And despite these prices, Lego has about 70 percent of the construction-toy market. Why? Why doesn't some competitor sell plastic blocks for less? Lego's patents expired a while ago. How hard could it be to make a cheap knockoff?

Luke, a 9-year-old Lego expert, set me straight.

"They pay attention to so much detail," he said. "I never saw a Lego piece ... that couldn't go together with another one."

Lego goes to great lengths to make its pieces really, really well, says David Robertson, who is working on a book about Lego.

Inside every Lego brick, there are three numbers, which identify exactly which mold the brick came from and what position it was in in that mold. That way, if there's a bad brick somewhere, the company can go back and fix the mold.

For decades this is what kept Lego ahead. It's actually pretty hard to make millions of plastic blocks that all fit together.

But over the past several years, a competitor has emerged: Mega Bloks. Plastic blocks that look just like Legos, snap onto Legos and are often half the price.

So Lego has tried other ways to stay ahead.

The company tried to argue in court that no other company had the legal right to make stacking blocks that look like Legos.

"That didn't fly," Robertson says. "Every single country that Lego tried to make that argument in decided against Lego."

But Lego did find a successful way to do something Mega Bloks could not copy: It bought the exclusive rights to Star Wars. If you want to build a Death Star out of plastic blocks, Lego is now your only option.

The Star Wars blocks were wildly successful. So Lego kept going - it licensed Indiana Jones, Winnie the Pooh, Toy Story and Harry Potter.

Sales of these products have been huge for Lego. More important, the experience has taught the company that what kids wanted to do with the blocks was tell stories. Lego makes or licenses the stories they want to tell.

And kids know the difference.

"If you were talking to a friend you wouldn't say, 'Oh my God, I just got a big set of Mega Bloks,' " Luke says. "When you say Legos they would probably be like, 'Awesome can we go to your house and play?' "

Lego made almost $3.5 billion in revenue last year. Mega made a tenth of that.

But Mega Bloks may yet gain on Lego.

Mega now owns the rights to Thomas the Tank Engine, Hello Kitty, and the video game Halo. And, on shelves for the first time ever this week: Mega Bloks Barbies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Legos Are So Expensive - And So Popular

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I went to Toys R Us recently to buy my son a Lego set for Hanukkah. Did you know a small box of Legos costs $60? Sixty bucks for 102 plastic blocks! In fact, I learned, Lego sets can sell for thousands of dollars.

# data[].attributes.body
This is an article from the Washington Post that delves into how Lego is the most innovative toy company in the world.
One of my research focuses will be how Lego was/is able to innovate its way into always being relevant while many toy lines have fallen by the wayside.  This would be a good source for that. Resource #6

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The LEGO movie pulled in $69.1 million last weekend (Warner Bros. Picture)

More than half a century after its founding, LEGO remains one of the most innovative companies in the world. It's not just that the company has been buoyed by the success of the new blockbuster LEGO movie, which pulled in a whopping $69.1 million last weekend - the company has consistently remained one step ahead of the innovation curve, releasing new products and finding new ways to engage users of all ages with its tiny, plastic bricks.

So what have been the keys to the company's innovation success?

Most importantly, LEGO has been unafraid to experiment with emerging new technologies to extend its brand from the world of physical play to the world of digital play. This is especially important because the current generation is growing up as the first all-digital generation. They are growing up with tablets and smartphones and expect to use them everywhere they go. As LEGO's top leadership has pointed out, the company is "embracing what digital can do." That means searching out relevant technologies that are both relevant and complementary to the basic LEGO brick.

As a result, the company has created a line of programmable robots, such as the R3ptar, that bridge the gap between physical play and virtual play. Since 1998, when LEGO began releasing its DIY Mindstorms kits, people have been increasingly able to assemble robots, program them via computer, and then control them via a combination of Bluetooth, downloadable apps and voice commands. It's now possible for a child under the age of ten to get an introduction to programming in a way that's fun and intuitive.

The company has also tapped into the full power of the crowd, both to crowdsource new designs for upcoming products and to encourage users to share their designs with the world via YouTube and other online social platforms. Whether planned or not, LEGO is now part of the DIY Maker movement, which encourages people to "tinker" and "hack" and find better ways of creating things. LEGO is now as much about making as it is about playing. In short, LEGO is a creativity catalyst.

This has tremendous implications for LEGO. The company is no longer just a toy company - it is now part of the DIY maker movement. It's not just about buying tiny plastic bricks for your kids, now it's also about adults re-engaging with the LEGO brand to build stunning new creations. Some even look like museum-ready designs. Spend just a few hours on Twitter or Facebook, and you'll almost certainly run into examples of people sharing examples of amazing LEGO creations.

Finally, LEGO has significantly expanded its growth trajectory into emerging and frontier markets. Growth in Asia, especially in China, has propelled LEGO past Hasbro in global toy sales. Worldwide, people now spend 5 billion hours a year playing with its toys. And there's more growth to come - LEGO is now extending into markets such as South Korea and Russia in pursuit of additional growth.

Which is not to say, however, that all this growth does not come without a cost for LEGO. Some have criticized LEGO for its new digital toy creations - such as that scary robotic snake - for being off-brand. Some have taken LEGO to task for losing its focus on fun - instead of letting people decide what they want to build, LEGO now offers detailed building manuals for creating complex designs. And, finally, critics of the new LEGO movie say that the company has lost its way with too much of an emphasis on product placement and edgy humor.

Yet, it's hard to think of a single other company that has so successfully bridged the gap between physical play and virtual play. No wonder educators have also embraced LEGO, creating new competitions for students, while parents have also remained loyal to the LEGO brand. As new technologies such as augmented reality and 3D printing enter the mainstream, it will be interesting to see how LEGO adapts these trends in the creation of new products that both surprise and delight the next generation of designers, builders and innovators.

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why LEGO is the most innovative toy company in the world

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
More than half a century after its founding, LEGO remains one of the most innovative companies in the world. It's not just that the company has been buoyed by the success of the new blockbuster LEGO movie, which pulled in a whopping $69.1 million last weekend - the company has consistently remained one step ahead of the innovation curve, releasing new products and finding new ways to engage users of all ages with its tiny, plastic bricks.

# data[].attributes.body
Just found this one from Fastcompany: How Lego Became the Apple of Toys. Resource #4.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Every September, largely unbeknownst to the rest of the company, a group of around 50 Lego employees descends upon Spain's Mediterranean coast, armed with sunblock, huge bins of Lego bricks, and a decade's worth of research into the ways children play. The group, which is called the Future Lab, is the Danish toy giant's secretive and highly ambitious R&D team, charged with inventing entirely new, technologically enhanced "play experiences" for kids all over the world. Or, as Lego Group CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp puts it, "It's about discovering what's obviously Lego, but has never been seen before."

On a Tuesday morning, the group is gathered in a book-lined room just off the pool at the Hotel Trias, in a sleepy town called Palamós, where they've met each of the last six years. There are bespectacled dudes in futuristic sneakers, a small cohort of stylish blonde women, and a much larger contingent of techie millennial guys in superhero T-shirts, all filling rows of folding chairs. At the front of the room, Erik Hansen, a tall, professorial member of Future Lab's leadership team, is running through the week's planned activities, which include extensive brainstorm sessions and a field trip to Barcelona (visiting the telecom giant Telefónica and some local design firms). He presents the agenda with a sober, vaguely robotic tone that makes what he does next surprising. As he brings the proceedings to a close, he asks, brightening, "Is everybody feeling awesome?" The team laughs and applauds, Hansen hits play on a laptop and, suddenly, every single member of the Future Lab team joins in with summer-camp enthusiasm to sing a song seared into the memory of everyone who made last year's The Lego Movie a $468 million global hit. On the off chance you aren't one of them, it goes like this:

Everything is awesome!
Everything is cool when you're part of a team!
Everything is awesome!
When we're living our dream!

In the movie, the song is used satirically. The Lego people living in a Lego world sing it because they've been brainwashed by an all-powerful corporation to mindlessly-but joyfully-accept a prepackaged set of beliefs and desires, including adamant rule-following. It is, as the film goes on to demonstrate, the opposite of the free-range creativity that's made Lego's toys beloved by kids and their parents for decades, and it's a slightly ironic choice for the meeting today. But taken at face value it's an effective team-building exercise, and the Future Lab can definitely use the boost, because their job is hard.

In the last 10 years, Lego has grown into nothing less than the Apple of toys: a profit-generating, design-driven miracle built around premium, intuitive, highly covetable hardware that fans can't get enough of. Last year, fueled in part by The Lego Movie's Pixar-size popularity, the privately held company briefly surged ahead of rival Mattel to become the biggest toy manufacturer in the world, reporting first-half profits of $273 million on revenue of $2.03 billion. It's a remarkable achievement, particularly considering that Mattel makes a huge range of products-including Barbie, Hot Wheels, Fisher-Price, and even the Lego knockoffs Mega Bloks-while Lego mostly sticks to variations on a single toy. The company has recently moved beyond its core markets of Europe and North America with a major push into Asia, where it saw double-digit growth in 2013. A brand-new manufacturing and distribution center in China is being built solely to meet growing demand on that side of the planet. "It's a very simple idea," says Knudstorp. "All bricks are complementary. They all fit together. Which creates a system that you can be endlessly creative in."

Now, as the rest of the company continues to refine its half-century-old mission, making cool, craveworthy helicopters and fire trucks and ninja castles, the Future Lab has to live up to its lofty name and invent Lego's future-in a world where play is increasingly digital.

Which is why the Future Lab relies on this intense week of brainstorming, group meals, and mid-ideation leaps into the pool. It all leads up to a 24-hour hackathon, where small teams-various combinations of industrial designers, interaction designers, programmers, ethnographic researchers, marketers, and even master builders (Lego wizards who can create anything out of bricks, such as George Washington's head or an X-Wing Starfighter)-compete to generate bigger, deeper, more awesome ideas that will be pursued back in Denmark. "We come here because we get the place cheap," half-jokes Future Lab head Søren Holm, a jovial Lego lifer. "But, really, the team spirit we get? They'll be talking about this trip all year."

About a decade ago, it looked like Lego might not have much of a future at all. In 2003, the company-based in a tiny Danish village called Billund and owned by the same family that founded it before World War II-was on the verge of bankruptcy, with problems lurking within like tree rot. Faced with growing competition from video games and the Internet, and plagued by an internal fear that Lego was perceived as old-fashioned, the company had been making a series of errors. Day-to-day management had been handed in 1998 to a "turnaround expert" with no toy background who continued to live in Paris, as business writer David C. Robertson outlines in his 2013 Lego history, Brick by Brick. There were disastrous detours away from the core experience, including the abysmal morning cartoon Galidor, and experiments with bigger, more macho minifigures with a line called Jack Stone. The company kept opening Legoland theme parks around the world, despite having limited expertise in hospitality. Sales of several of Lego's most successful products, including Lego's Star Wars and Harry Potter lines, bobbed up and down based on movie release schedules over which Lego had no control. And the company wildly increased the number of products it released each year, resulting in a dreadful 2002 Christmas season, when major retailers ended up with around 40% of their Lego stock unsold.

Enter Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, a deeply process-based thinker-and, not incidentally, a father of four-who arrived from McKinsey & Co. in 2001 and was promoted to CEO three years later, when he was 36. (He took over from Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, grandson of Lego founder Ole Kirk Christiansen.) Knudstorp points to an expensive venture called Darwin as an example of what Lego had been doing wrong. The project was intended to establish a meticulous digital library of every Lego element, which involved setting up what Robertson, in his book, referred to as "the largest installation of Silicon Graphics supercomputers in Northern Europe." The main application ended up being an online software tool called Lego Digital Designer, which allowed fans to design their own kits using the digital bricks and receive their custom sets in the mail. The problem was that it lacked any appeal. "We found that most consumers think that's already the whole core experience of Lego-they buy some bricks and they make their own products," says Knudstorp. "There's no reason for them to design it up front and pay for that. They just want to buy the bricks."

Knudstorp began turning the company around by making several key moves: improving processes, cutting costs, and managing cash flow. Then came stabilization. "But after that, we knew there'd be a third phase of organic growth," he says. That required figuring out what a modern Lego should even be, which Knudstorp accomplished in part by investing in a kind of research the company had never done before-deep ethnographic studies of how kids around the world really play. Today, Lego may know as much about that subject as any organization on earth. The Future Lab (along with a similar group that preceded it) has been responsible for that work. "There's the famous quote that if you want to understand how animals live, you don't go to the zoo, you go to the jungle," Knudstorp says. "The Future Lab has really pioneered that within Lego, and it hasn't been a theoretical exercise. It's been a real design-thinking approach to innovation, which we've learned an awful lot from."

This year, the small team inside Future Lab that was in charge of research became part of the company's fast-growing Global Insights team-one of the main ways Future Lab thinking is making its way into the broader company. It's run by Anne Flemmert-Jensen, a former academic with an artsy vibe, reflected today in the leather leggings, long nubby sweater, and asymmetrical necklace she's wearing. Global Insights conducts a lot of its research itself, but also partners with universities around the world and works with big agencies like Ideo. Global Insights is even charged with tracking a wide range of sales data and keeping tabs on what the competition is up to. They know a lot about you and your children, and not all of it is flattering. "There's a clear distinction between American and European parents that keeps popping up everywhere," Flemmert-Jensen says. "American parents don't like play experiences where they have to step in and help their kids a lot. They want their kids to be able to play by themselves. We see among European parents, it's okay to sit on the floor and spend time with the kids." (Asked if it's possible that American parents just want their kids to be independent, she responds, somewhat dubiously, "That's one of many possible interpretations.")

The Friends line "has been very, very successful," CEO Knudstorp says. It's caught on with girls in markets from China to Germany to the U.S."

In 2011, Lego acted on some of its research by launching a major effort to attract girls to the brand with a line called Lego Friends. Lots of girls already enjoyed Lego toys, but there wasn't a play theme-Lego-speak for a top-level category, like Lego City or Star Wars, which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to launch-designed for them. For the pink- and purple-accented Friends, the original marketing commitment alone was $40 million, and while it attracted some criticism for kits including the Heartlake Shopping Mall and a juice bar, there's also a news van and a farm stand and several sets devoted to the curvy, long-haired characters rescuing endangered animals in a jungle. And it reveals some interesting Lego insights about play. For one, boys tend to be more compelled by a strong narrative-which is reflected in Lego's popular boy-focused lines like Ninjago and Legends of Chima, which come with almost comically detailed backstories. Girls, on the other hand, tend to use their sets for role-play. (Both boys and girls love the building aspect of Lego.) In any case, Friends, according to Knudstorp, has been a major hit. "It's very, very successful," he says. "It caught on with girls in markets from China to Germany to the U.S. And it continues to grow very strongly for us."

Friends, like Ninjago and Chima-and The Lego Movie and its coming sequel-represents the company's increasing reliance on its own intellectual property. Licensing deals still flourish, Knudstorp says, "but they contribute no more of our business than about a third," he adds. "They're on a list of about 10 things that drive the growth of the company."

What's Lego's ultimate goal? Is it growth for growth's sake? As a privately held company, Lego has no need to demonstrate anything to markets or shareholders. According to Knudstorp, he only has to worry about "the shareholder"-Christiansen's heirs-who have two official objectives: that Lego continue to create innovative play experiences and reach more children every year. "They are not pushing us very hard on the financial target," he insists. "What they like about, say, Lego Friends is that we're engaging more children. They see growth as one testimony of whether we're sufficiently innovative."

Eight years ago, a Chicago architect named Adam Reed Tucker, who had been building impressive Lego models of iconic buildings, reached out to Lego, suggesting that the company might be interested in making official kits similar to his homemade creations. "Doing anything that wasn't for the target group, which was boys between, say, 5 and 11, used to be almost a complete no-go," says David Gram, Future Lab's head of marketing and business development. But a free-thinking Norwegian Lego exec named Paal Smith-Meyer-Holm admiringly describes him as "a true rebel"-saw value in AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego) and came up with a stealthy, shoestring plan to prove their worth to the company. It came in the form of a counteroffer-which would help usher in the current era of innovation at Lego.

"We told him to do it," Gram says. "We provided him with the bricks and he sat in his kitchen in his two-bedroom flat, doing the first 200 boxes of the Sears Tower and the Hancock tower." In 2007, the homemade sets that would go on to become the wildly popular Lego Architecture line appeared in some local shops, and not only did they sell, they sold for way more money than a kids' kit with the same number of pieces would have, because Lego could charge grown-up prices. "Seventy dollars instead of 30!" Gram adds. "That proved the case."

In 2011, Lego rolled out another innovation, which it had been testing under the name Lego Cuusoo in Japan since 2008: the crowdsourcing site Lego Ideas, where superfans can submit suggestions for sets, other fans vote, and Lego produces limited editions of the best and most popular (such as Back to the Future's DeLorean and the Ghostbusters Ectomobile, which are now widely marketed). "Kids aren't buying those," Gram points out. "They don't know what those things are." Surprisingly, even a year ago management still wasn't entirely comfortable with the idea. "They were saying, 'This is something we don't know about-it's very gimmicky.' " And now? "I can't tell you the numbers, but it performed well," Gram says. "Like really well!" He laughs happily. "And it's now being looked upon as something that could be a serious thing for the company going forward."

In addition to learning about who is playing with their products, Lego is learning about how. Future Lab research has shown that kids no longer make meaningful distinctions between digital play, like Minecraft, and physical play, like snapping together a Nindroid MechDragon (a half-robot, half-pterodactyl ninja nemesis, obviously) out of Legos. It's the basis of Future Lab's ongoing brief, called "One Reality," which emphasizes novel hybrid digital-physical Lego experiences that typically involve playing with a set of bricks alongside a piece of software running on a phone, tablet, or computer.

Late last summer, Lego quietly debuted a Future Lab pilot project called Lego Fusion, limited to North American Toys "R" Us stores and Lego's own retail outlets. There were four versions, at $34.99 each: Town Master, Battle Towers, Create & Race, and Resort Designer. The play experience is similar for each-a kid builds a model of a house or castle, takes a photo of it with a tablet, and watches his or her creation become part of a virtual world inside an accompanying app.

The Future Lab offers "a real design-thinking approach to innovation, which we've learned an awful lot from," says Knudstorp.

Kids and parents seem intrigued, and Fusion Town Master ended up on last year's Toys "R" Us list of the 15 hottest Christmas toys (which some Future Lab staff seemed to believe had as much to do with Lego's relationship with the retailer, and the exclusivity deal, as with its actual popularity). But even its creators admit that Fusion was at best a 1.0 version of a digital-physical play experience. "Maybe a 0.9," says Gram with a grin. The thing is, it's just not that cool yet. In Town Master, for instance, kids don't build a 3-D house-they use a handful of special bricks to make a flattened outline of a house, which only becomes fully 3-D when it appears in the app. "With Fusion we created one type of play," he continues. "Right now it's very based on, 'You build a model, you scan it into a game.' I think we'll see other patterns."

There's an old Simpsons episode where Bart visits Mad magazine and is disappointed to discover it's just a boring old office-until he ducks his head in the door one more time and catches Alfred E. Neuman and the gang in a state of total pandemonium. Visiting Billund, the town Lego built, is a little like that. Only 6,194 people live here-the population balloons each weekday morning when Lego's 4,000-some employees arrive. (There's so little to do in Billund at night that a large percentage of employees lives more than 50 miles away in the closest major city, Aarhus.) Nestled near the Lego campus are a few small businesses, an uninviting modernist church, some low-slung office buildings, and, in an almost surreal testament to the founding family's wealth and influence, Denmark's second-largest airport.

But if you're lucky, you might just get a taste of some Willy Wonka-esque magic. For one, you'll likely stay in the Hotel Legoland, possibly in a room with-for better or worse-a pirate or princess theme and boxes of bricks you can play with after you raid the minibar. (The hotel is attached to Lego's original theme park, which the company sold a majority share of, along with three other outposts, to a British company called Merlin in 2005.) Just up the road is the primary administration building, with a bright yellow lobby designed to resemble the world's biggest 2x4 brick and a massive logo behind the reception desk, built from 12,500 minifigures.

Walk just a little farther and you'll hit the main campus-a cluster of buildings that has grown around a stately old home sporting a pair of lions out front. The house is Lego's most holy site, built in 1932 by the company's founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, when he set up shop in Billund as a carpenter. When demand for furniture tanked during the Great Depression, he began making wooden toys, such as ducks and tractors and yo-yos. He called the company Lego-a contraction of the Danish phrase leg godt (which translates to "play well")-in 1934.

The entire saga, from wooden ducks through recent near-bankruptcy and beyond, is told in a charming private museum called Idea House, which winds its way through Christiansen's old home. It's open to staff seeking inspiration, retailers, and other VIP visitors, and includes an archive of almost every Lego kit ever made, stored in climate-controlled basement stacks. ( Fans who want a similarly immersive adventure will have to wait until next year, when the Lego House "experience center" opens around the corner.) Alone in a hallway is a piece of 1940s-era tech: an injection-molding machine that would change the way kids play forever. In 1945, Christiansen met with a supplier of these machines and quickly recognized their potential for producing colorful objects in virtually any shape. Amazingly, he didn't actually come up with the idea for the bricks himself. The supplier had several examples of things one could make-including a plastic stacking brick that a British company called Kiddicraft already had on the market. Intrigued, Christiansen pocketed one for further study. Deciding there was potential, he purchased one of the machines, redesigned the brick, and, in 1949, released his own version, calling them Automatic Binding Bricks. If you somehow came across one of those first Lego sets, you'd be pleased to discover they're compatible with all the billions of bricks that have followed.

Even if Christiansen couldn't take credit for the idea, he did come up with the key twist that makes Legos so satisfying. Bricks in early sets had the studs on top, so they'd stack neatly, but were hollow underneath, so models had a frustrating tendency to fall apart. He experimented with his stud-and-tube solution until it had precisely the right amount of "clutch power," which is Lego-speak for the perfect, patented amount of stick-tight enough to build models that can sustain rowdy play, but loose enough that they can be easily pried apart. Except for a material swap in 1963 to the shiny, hard ABS plastic still used today, the basic bricks have never changed.

But almost everything else has, starting with the introduction of the preschool-focused Duplo in 1969 and minifigures in 1978. The best way to get a sense of the variety of the current Lego portfolio-which includes approximately 3,000 unique elements in more than 50 color options-is to see them all in one place. Innovation House, an airy, open-atrium building (complete with an interior slide) where most of the designers work, has a public-library-size room where designers can grab any element they need, like 2x4s in every color and hundreds of tiny Darth Vader heads. If a project requires a piece that doesn't currently exist, a prototyping workshop can whip it up. (Future Lab head Holm remembers having to hand-draw schematics and send them off for fabrication. Now the process happens at the push of a button.) New elements aren't added to the portfolio lightly, though, because it costs as much as $250,000 to make a new mold, and all new elements must first be vetted by the Model Committee.

The Future Lab's headquarters are in an aging two-story yellow-brick building across the plaza, intentionally separate from the other design groups. "One thing I've learned is how important it is to protect yourself as a team," says Holm. "We have a tendency to work on experiences that are far away from what Lego does today. The perception can be like, 'Come on, guys, that can never work.' And it's so easy to kill an idea." Entrance requires several swipes of an ID card, and only the staff assigned to the group and a handful of the most senior management have access. It's a clandestine place within a generally close-to-the-vest company, with one former designer comparing the Lab to working for the CIA. (Even staffers' spouses have no idea what their partners spend their days working on.)

On a gray October afternoon, Future Lab's head of design, Ditte Bruun Pedersen, is sipping a cup of herbal tea in a common area in Innovation House. A trained architect with cropped, Tintin-ish blond hair, she ranges from analytical to enthusiastic-a very Lego personality. (Holm describes her as "positive, energetic, and with a fantastic skill set-she knows beneath her skin what's Lego and what's not.") Before she took on her current management role, Pedersen was the design lead on the Fusion project and knows as much about it as anyone in the company. It turns out there are many challenges raised by the prospect of physical-meets-digital play. For one, it's not necessarily an intuitive experience for kids, so the flow between setting down the bricks and picking up the tablet (or vice versa) has to be carefully choreographed. It's also crucial that neither the brick set nor the digital component feels tacked on, which turns out to be especially hard to get right. "We were very focused on making sure it feels balanced," she says. "We had some experiences where we were like, 'There's something wrong here,' and it turned out to be that the Lego had been diminished into a key that unlocked the digital play. Where's the fun in that?"

Pedersen recently returned from a trip to Boston, where she spent time with kids who had been living with Fusion for a while. (These children weren't given the sets as part of a focus group-their parents actually went to a store, saw them on the shelf and decided to buy a set.) She'd observed some interesting things. For one, it oddly never occurred to anyone in Future Lab that the tablets kids would have access to might have covers on them, which, it turns out, changes the way a child is most likely to hold the device, making it hard to take the photo at the correct angle. It's a major, frustrating impediment to flow. They'd also discovered that one set, Create & Race, wasn't nearly as satisfying an experience as they had expected it to be. Almost all the fun turned out to be in the app, leaving parents wondering why they had shelled out for a box of bricks. By November that set had been discontinued.

Five years ago, Lego would never have considered a pilot product like Fusion, Gram says. There would have been too many concerns that a subpar product might tarnish the brand's reputation for quality. (One example of how thoroughly quality is policed: Every brick is encoded with a tiny number so that if a defective one were to leave the plant, Lego could track it back to the machine that made it-one of thousands the company has around the world-to determine what went wrong.)

Some within the company still bear scars from pricey learning experiences including Lego Universe, a failed World of Warcraft clone that was discontinued in 2012, a little more than a year after its introduction. But that's also one of the reasons for creating a division like Future Lab, which lives inside of a metaphorical walled garden-where mistakes can be made relatively cheaply and lots can be learned. "It's led us to some extremely interesting concepts, even though 90% or more have never launched," says Knudstorp. "But when you do such an exploration you become a lot more clever about everything from different business models to ways of developing a meaningful play experience. And you become wiser about the things you actually do launch."

Back in Spain, Future Lab's whiz kids have been divided into eight teams for the hackathon. The bulk of the group is Danish and American-Lego's official work language is English-but employees also hail from Chile, India, the U.K., Thailand, and elsewhere. Almost all are young, at least slightly nerdy, and in possession of an advanced degree in design, technology, or business management. Holm, who joined Lego in his early twenties as a model builder without any real work experience (and went on to create some of the company's biggest hits, including the early-2000s craze Bionicle), admits he probably wouldn't be qualified for a design job in Future Lab now. "The technical requirements have changed so much," he says. "There isn't as much place for what in Danish we call ole opfinder." He searches for the word in English, and sounds a little wistful when he finds it. "You'd probably say 'inventors.' "

At their disposal are bins of Lego bricks, laptops loaded with animation software, a preschool's worth of arts-and-crafts supplies, pro-quality digital cameras, and, for energy, endless plates of gummi candy and other sugary snacks. (A real treat, because sugar is banned on the Lego campus, except in coffee.) An inspiration wall features long shelves loaded with hot new gadgets and competitors' products, including Oculus Rift virtual-reality gear and a tablet accessory they admire so much they ask for it not to be mentioned. "It's a small startup and things would go crazy for them," says Gram.

When the teams present their ideas to leadership the following day, they are strikingly polished. They range from way cooler Fusion-ish toys to Internet-of-Things -style experiences-and a couple feel like they could go directly into development. Which they may well have by now, joining at least four projects that are currently making their way through various parts of the Future Lab's system.

In February, the Future Lab will be bringing out a second product: Portal Racers, a free, entirely digital game with a hovercraft theme, designed to work with a new 3-D laptop camera from Intel called RealSense (which the processor giant has just started to roll out on new computers). The camera, which can track users' body movements, allows for new Kinect-like ways of interacting with a computer, which the game harnesses. The original idea was to have kids build their own hovercrafts out of bricks and scan them into the game, Fusion-style, but unless Portal Racers somehow becomes a huge success, Gram says it will remain a digital-only experience. And while it certainly looks fun in the video they have of kids testing it, it will be a much more modest launch than Fusion. It seems to be as much about Future Lab getting to understand a new technology as about creating an awesome game for kids.

Which will be increasingly valuable information. During one of the final presentations in Palamós, a young designer mentions that no matter how well Lego sets are selling, their research shows that kids are spending less and less time playing with them every year, that other pleasures are pulling them away. Gram is sure that's one Future Lab message the rest of the company has heard loud and clear: Experimentation "is something we can't afford not to do."

A guide to Lego'smost experimental projects.

"It's a classical skunk-works approach,"says Lego CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp of Future Lab and its predecessor groups, which have been charged with developing entirely new play experiences (that often end up reaching the market in controlled trial runs). "It's a small area of the company that operates a little outside the rules," he says, yet one that delivers vital information.

Launched: 1998 (Worldwide)

Lego's robotics platform, created with MIT's Media Lab, gave the Future Lab some of its key DNA. It was the company's first hybrid digitalphysical experience, and was the first time adult fans were brought into the design process. (Lego realized that its most hard-core users knew more about programming toys than they did.)

Launched: 2007 (Chicago); 2009 (Worldwide)

Now a global hit helping fans build models of nearly 20 buildings, Lego Architecture started in the most grassroots way possible: Lego employees, without management approval, provided bricks to an architect in Chicago, and he created replicas of the Sears and Hancock towers- hundreds of them.

Launched: 2008 (Japan); 2011 (Worldwide)

Fans vote on new-kit ideas submitted by amateur designers. Anything with more than 10,000 votes goes to a review phase, and Lego decides which get made. So far, the process has created more than 10 limited- availability kits, including a model lab staffed by female scientists and the Big Bang Theory apartment.

Launched: 2009 (England and Germany); 2010 (Worldwide)

The line began with 20 board games, including Lava Dragon and Pirate Code, and combined traditional game play with Lego bricks. Future Lab's Ditte Bruun Pedersen came up with the idea of Lego Dice, which snap together and can be configured in different ways depending on the game. The line was discontinued in 2013.

Launched: 2011 (U.S.); 2012 (Worldwide)

The puzzle game, targeted at families, combines a special set of bricks with a smartphone app. Part of the experience involves importing shapes built with the bricks into the app via the phone's camera. It marked a breakthrough for the company in blending physical and digital play, which has become the Future Lab's primary focus.

Launched: 2013 (U.S. Toys "R" Us and Lego Stores)

An evolution of Life of George, Fusion's three kits (Town Master, Battle Towers, and Resort Designer) provide a similar interactive experience: users build something with the included bricks and scan it with a camera into a tablet game. Future Lab is studying how kids play with the toy to try to improve the experience.

A version of this article appeared in the February 2015 issue of Fast Company magazine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Every September, largely unbeknownst to the rest of the company, a group of around 50 Lego employees descends upon Spain's Mediterranean coast, armed with sunblock, huge bins of Lego bricks, and a decade's worth of research into the ways children play.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a blog entry I wrote.  This served as the impetus for my research topic. Not really a resource.  I may take some from this and use it in my intro or conclusion.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I saw recently that Hasbro and Mattel, the leading children's toy manufacturers, are terrified that kids are more interest in high-tech toys than the good old action figures of the past.

I can almost hear people start to grumble, these damn kids today. The toys we played with aren't good enough for them now! They need computers and games and to be entertained. When we were young, we could entertain ourselves!

While there might be a grain of truth there, the real question is would the older generation be any different if they were young today? Of course not.

But the real issue isn't the kids. The real issue is whether Hasbro and Mattel will be able to innovate and adapt.

I mean Lego's, as traditional of a toy as ever, are more popular than ever. So why are the other toy makers struggling?

I think they're struggling to adapt to a new generation of child. As I said before, Lego's have already done it by marketing Lego sets that figure prominently into the biggest of franchises (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Batman, Star Wars, Sponge Bob, Cars . . .). Not only that but even their original products, such as Ninjago and Mindstorm, are just as popular. One reason is they have developed a TV show around the Ninjago line and implemented technology and robotics in the Mindstorm line.

Even the classic children's toy line, Fisher-Price, is ahead of the game.

This Christmas Kristie bought the kids a new line of toy called Imaginext.

It is a Dungeons and Dragons type of play set. We got the kids a castle with knights, an ogre, a dragon, a catapult, and a battering ram.

What we didn't realize until we unwrapped everything was how they all functioned together. Somehow, whether it's with a micro chip or something else, but the castle can tell what type of thing is attacking it.

If you shoot it with the boulders from the catapult, the castle recognizes it and voices a command unique to the catapult. If it's under attack from the dragon, it issues a unique command for the dragon. The same is true for the battering ram.

Not only that but after everything was unwrapped, we noticed a DVD that came with the castle.

The kids watched that on the way to EGF. At first, I thought it would be just one episode of the Imaginext dungeons and dragons figures. But no. They had an episode for each unique line of Imaginenext products (I didn't know this, but there are also Imaginext pilots, pirates, space invaders, and super heroes). What a brilliant idea. Now, every kid who watches that will want to branch out to the other collections (and maybe that's not so great news for the parents who have to buy it all, but what an innovative marketing strategy).

Plus, there were a few episodes that even had different characters from different collections collaborating together. Again, a brilliant marketing move. Never did I see my He-Man figures playing with GI Joes and working with Star Wars figures (I realize they were made from different companies, but you get my point). I played with them that way, but it felt wrong. Never was I empowered to do that . . . and to buy even more toys because of it.

That's what Mattel and Hasbro have to start doing. Innovate or die.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I saw recently that Hasbro and Mattel, the leading children's toy manufacturers, are terrified that kids are more interest in high-tech toys than the good old action figures of the past. I can almost hear people start to grumble, these damn kids today. The toys we played with aren't good enough for them now!

# data[].attributes.body
A Lego Bricumentary
This is a documentary on Lego.  I have this downloaded to my computer.  I would imagine this would be my second go-to source behind the book, Brick by Brick. Resource #2.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Chris Evans Movie Lego Deadpool Red Band Trailer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Beyond Gotham Full Movie All Cutscenes Cinematic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A LEGO Brickumentary Official Trailer #1 (2015) - Lego Documentary HD

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Subscribe to TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/sxaw6h Subscribe to COMING SOON: http://bit.ly/H2vZUn Subscribe to INDIE TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/1F9OK9b Like us on FACEBOOK: http://goo.gl/dHs73 Follow us on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/1ghOWmt A LEGO Brickumentary Official Trailer #1 (2015) - Lego Documentary HD If you thought you knew the world of LEGO®, you don't know brick.

# data[].attributes.body
Brick by Brick
This will likely be one of my main sources for my paper.  The subtitle says it all: "How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovated and Conquered the Global Toy Industry." Resource #1 - should be my main source.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry
More about this product

|

# data[].attributes.body
Here is the original article I read that prompted the blog post.  This article focuses on how traditional toy lines are terrified that kids are losing interesting in "old world" toys.  I find it ironic that Legos are more popular than ever.  And it's hard to be more "old world" than Legos.  What is Legos secret?  This might be a useful article for my intro or maybe a supporting detail. Resource #5 - back up article. Most likely use in my intro or conclusion or minor supporting details.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Children With Tablets

Back in the old days, American kids only wanted a Barbie doll or a G.I. Joe action figure for Christmas and all was right with the world. But times have changed, and today American children are looking to get more high-tech Christmas gift such as tablets, the Financial Times reports. In fact, today's children are so interested in tablets and smartphones that major toy manufacturers Hasbro and Mattel are said to be worried sick about their futures.
[More from BGR: Sprint salesman refuses to sell iPhone to customer, says his 'fingers are too fat' to use it]
"The top two guys, Mattel and Hasbro, they are terrified," Sean McGowan, managing director of equity research at Needham & Company, told the Financial Times. "They should be terrified, but the official party line is they're not terrified."
[More from BGR: First photos of BlackBerry 10 'N-Series' QWERTY smartphone leak]
These anxieties are compounded by the fact that Mattel's top-selling product this year isn't any kind of traditional toy, but a plastic cellphone case. And as the Financial Times notes, tablets aren't just something that children use every now and then out of boredom, since "the amount of time children are spending with technology devices has skyrocketed" because they can "watch free content online and play free video games for hours on end."

This article was originally published by BGR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mattel and Hasbro said to be 'terrified' as more kids seek high-tech Christmas gifts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Back in the old days, American kids only wanted a Barbie doll or a G.I. Joe action figure for Christmas and all was right with the world. But times have changed, and today American children are looking to get more high-tech Christmas gift such as tablets, the Financial Times reports.