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and its loyal, talented, and committed consumers (LEGO Annual Report
2005
). For
example, loyal LEGO fans are serviced through a number of measures, such as
LEGO Factory. It was the ambition that product development and process improve-
ments should take place in close dialogue with LEGO fans, which should through
different channels have the possibility of presenting ideas to the Group's designers.
The many adult LEGO enthusiasts all over the world, comprising an increasingly
active group of fans, were also involved. The Ambassador Program is an offi cial
program which invites adult LEGO fans to share their enthusiasm for the LEGO
idea and LEGO products and encourages interaction in the global LEGO communi-
ties. Moreover, the LEGO Certifi ed Professionals program caters for adult fans
who, wholly or partly, live by their LEGO hobby and therefore wish to enter into
cooperation with the LEGO Group. The idea of putting customers to work is not
entirely new. Ritzer (
2004
) argued about the increasing rationalization processes of
companies in a McDonaldizing world that have long relied on the appropriation of
consumers' work. McDonald's restaurants turn customers into waiters and cleaning
personnel, for example, while the automated teller machine (ATM) “allows every-
one to work, for at least a few moments, as an unpaid bank teller” (Ritzer
2004
,
p. 63), and with the emergence of internet communication technologies, companies
fi nd more innovative ways to extract free labor from their consumers (c.f. Terranova
2000
). The concept of co-creation signifi es the transfer of the McDonaldization
logic of customer work from the sphere of production and process effi ciency (c.f.
Ritzer
2004
) to that of new product development and innovation. In other words,
“co-creation economy can be seen as driven by the need of capital to set up pro-
cesses that enable the liberation and capture of large repositories of technical, social,
and cultural competence in places previously considered outside the production of
monetary value.” In short, the co-creation economy is about experimenting with
new possibilities for value creation that are based on the expropriation of free cul-
tural, technological, social, and affective labor of the consumer masses (Zwick et al.
2008
, p. 166). According to Holbrook (
1996
), value can be defi ned as “an interac-
tive relativistic preference experience.” This suggests the argument that experience
defi nes what is valuable to a fan. This is an emergence of a new logic for value
creation where value is embedded in personalized experiences. LEGO fans are
increasingly savvy about the value created through their attention and engagement:
“some are seeking ways to extract something in return for their creative co-creation
and in recognition of the value they are generating” (Jenkins et al.
2013
, p. 57). This
emerging production ecology involves new kinds of distributed organizations and
ad hoc platforms and epitomizes the drift of value (Hartley
2004
) allowing us to
understand how fan-oriented corporate innovative initiatives infl uence fans and vice
versa. From this perspective, customers are confi gured as uniquely skilled workers
who, for the production of value-in-use to occur, must be given full rein to articulate
their inimitable requirements and share their knowledge (Prahalad and Ramaswamy
2004
) as inputs to the manufacturing process. Online communication technology
enables fans to participate in collective production, especially in the discourse on
participatory culture (Schäfer
2011
). Such participation demands acknowledgment
of the fans' interests as fully legitimate elements of the design process (Simonsen
