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Case Study

New business in the LEGO group: LEGO mindstorms

By Johan Roos, Bart Victor and David Oliver

13 pages

April 2000

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Reference: IMD-3-0864

This case charts the development of LEGO MINDSTORMS-a product built around a programmable LEGO brick containing a computer chip–which bridges the toy and computer industries. LEGO established a strategic project team to develop this idea into a marketable product, which the MINDSTORMS team did while operating at extremely high speed and using what LEGO’s “core business” would consider highly non-traditional management techniques. The core business operation is also described, along with some of the change initiatives it had undertaken. The case ends with a senior management dilemma: should the MINDSTORMS business and team be integrated into LEGO’s core operations following its successful launch, or should MINDSTORMS be set up as a separate business within the LEGO Group?

Keywords

Toy

Settings

World/global, Denmark
Lego Group (The)
1999

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

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