As a frequent speaker on peer to peer issues, there is always a temptation to settle into routines, and if you do so many lectures, there is always a danger that your memory turns originally distinct experiences into a single blur.

There is one event in the year where I think this will not happen, and these are the memorable experiences of the annual gathering of the Center for the Experience Economy.

I attended last year’s event more intensively than my shorter stay this year, and I still remember it as one of the most convivial learning experiences that I have been able to attend. The setting, the beautiful Castell d’Empordo in the Spanish/Catalan countryside around Girona, certainly plays a role, perched as it is above a splendid valley. Albert Boswijk each year assembles the most interesting combination of pioneers in the field, and the limited number of attendees guarantees that the exchanges are continuous and intensive. Last year I remember especially a Dutch restaurant owner preparing dinner in a balloon, and one of the highlights was Mark Hansen, director of Business Development at Lego, who has been focusing his life’s work on spurring co-creation processes between Lego as a corporate community and the legions of fans that are normally operating independently of the company. This year Mark Hansen gave us an equally fascinating account of his progress. I have no longer any doubt that Lego is simply, at least if Mark’s projects can be further carried out, the paradigmatic example of the mutual adaptation of a business with its surrounding communities. Rather than prohibiting user involvement, Mark’s instinct go into the opposite direction of learning to tap further and further into it, and to develop mutually beneficial relationships.

I would like to recall my own Three Laws of Co-Creation.

Law 1 states that any for-profit company that uses closed proprietary content, and excludes participation, will tend to loose from competing for-benefit institutions that can count on a community of voluntary contributors and uses open proprietary formats.

Law 2 states that, when two for-profit companies are competing, the one opting for open and participatory strategies will outcompete those who do not adopt such practices.

Law 3 states that communities of peer producers which successfully can ally themselves with an ecology of business practicing benefit-sharing with the commons they are deriving value from, will be more successful that those that remain isolated.

In his presentation, Mark Hansen first highlighted the 3 communities that play a role for Lego: the young kids, the mature community of almost exclusively male enthusiasts, and parents/mothers as gift givers. Lego’s first experience with co-creation was when it decided not to fight Lego Mindstorm hackers, but to honour their innovation; Lego has now instituted a formal Mindstorms NXT Developers Panel which selected 100 of 9600 candidates, but Mark is now convinced that this process has probably been too selective and that the company should have a even more inclusive process to tap into the co-creative processes.

Lego is also surrounded by an enormously active constellation of Lego User Groups (for example LUGNet), which operate totally independently of the company, and exchange and show designs amongst themselves. This is of course a prototypical example of peer producing commons-oriented fan communities at work.

Mark was then instrumental in developing the Lego Factory model, which is a crowdsourcing model, whereby the creativity of users is integrated within Lego’s own value chain. Fans can design new kits, post them on the site, where they can be ordered. Lego produces and distributes the kits, but giving the fan-designers a stake in the sale (5%).

Mark has a vision of the evolution of user involvement which is very congruent with my own ladder of participation modeling of open business models.

He distinguishes the following phases:

– LEGO developed + LEGO Published, the classic consumption model

– Co-developed + LEGO Published, co-design

– User-developed + LEGO Published, Lego is here only a platform for user-design (Lego Factory)

– User-developed + User published

– User enterprise + LEGO supported

We could argue about the logic of the last two phases, and it would be legitimate to consider that user-development/publishing is the more logical endpoint, but the logic of temporality is correct. Indeed, peer communities are not waiting for the corporations permission to do their own thing, but businesses can then subsequently adapt, and become a platform of support and development which users can use to develop their own enterprises.

LEGO has not undertaken the last step, but Mark then showed an advanced prototyping of the very ambitious virtual world system that LEGO will be launching soon, i.e. Lego Universe. It will offer a combination of already prepared worlds, but also allow for new universes to be created by users; and there will be ultimately a full integration with production capabilities which could be user-initiated. In other words,it will be possible to physically produce successful virtual user-led creations.

If LEGO pulls this off, it will really have established itself as the paradigmatic example of business adaptation to the challenges and opportunities presented by the emergence of peer production.
Because LEGO is very much a physical product, it gives us an early indication of the interplay between design by open communities, and the physical production processes undertaken by companies.

These were not the only interesting presentations at this year’s gathering, but because of my shorter stay, I only witnessed only two other highlights. ID & T and Q-Dance showed how a dance event which can attract up to 60,000 participants (Sensation White) can become an instant success (tickets are sold out almost as soon as the date is posted), can achieve such a traction with internet only communication amongst targeted micro-communities, while Olaf Boswijk showed a beautiful example of benefit-sharing by a corporation. The Red Bull Music Academy is an annual gathering of young deejays and older legendary musicians which is meant to repay the dance communities that established the success of the brand, which does not stress any public brand advantages but rather a general support for cultural and creative development, that creates a strong network amongst the participants and creates long-lasting cooperative and creative projects.