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many companies in different sectors (Lego, Nike, Ideastorm, etc.), it remains little
understood. With the overall shift to more open innovation, crowdsourcing is
growing in importance. Although it is a powerful resource for companies, it is none-
theless very complex and gives rise to many questions (Hopkins
2011
). Moreover,
academic research on strategic management and media technologies has only
recently begun to examine business models based on crowdsourcing. From the
crowdsourcing, LEGO rewrote the rules of value co-creation. In the literature, co-
creation is tightly related to crowdsourcing (Brabham
2008
), co-innovation (Lee
et al.
2012
), or user innovation (Bogers et al.
2010
). The source of new competitive
advantage and the fertile ground for company's profi table growth lie in the strategic
capital built by continuously interaction with its fans. Such collaboration involves
enabling co-creative interactions so that individuals can have meaningful and com-
pelling engagement experiences.
“Bringing the fans into the company marks a wider shift noticeable in many layers
of society and culture, a shift based on the early philosophy of the internet: the many-
to-many approach rather than the one-to-many approach (Lauwaert
2009
).” Instead
of having LEGO designers work in secrecy behind closed doors on new LEGO sets,
the LEGO Company will invite the fans and the users to “sit at the table” with the
designers and work together on future LEGO sets. “Increasingly, technology is at
stake in toys, games and playing. With the immense popularity of computer games,
questions concerning the role and function of technology in play have become more
pressing. A key aspect of the increasing technologization and digitalization of both
toys and play is the vagueness of borders between producers, consumers and players.
In these so-called participatory cultures characterized by a many-to-many model,
players do not play with a toy designed behind closed doors but become co-designers
of their own toys (Lauwaert
2009
, p. 8).” Participatory cultures are often hailed as a
democratizing force, the ultimate means of consumer or user empowerment. “After
all,” Maaike Lauwaert argued: “one can now take on a more active role as consumer
or user, be it as designer or co-designer of new products or product updates, as
reviewer of consumer goods or as an expert helping out other users. These many-to-
many or participatory options embody the promise that a more actively engaged
relationship with traditionally remote processes is now possible, if not the actual
democratization of certain consumerist processes. These changes are, needless to
say, not restricted to consumerist processes but spread out into the domains of poli-
tics, knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination (p. 9).”
Signifi cant efforts and much research have been put into an even more promising
aspect of corporate innovation: accessing ideas outside the corporation. The possi-
bilities to gain access to the vast spectrum of ideas outside the fi rm are being
explored to take advantage of such broad innovation potential. The generation of
ideas has become more democratic. A particular focus has been placed on users,
which are argued to be “perhaps the most important developers of innovations.”
According to Weiers (
2014
), “as the generation of ideas becomes more and more
distributed and democratized, they become increasingly likely to originate outside
the corporation, with independent inventors, customers, suppliers, lead users, any-
one really.”
