One of our featured speakers at this month’s Impact conference is Tom Donaldson, the Senior Vice President who oversees the Creative Play Lab at The LEGO Group, the Danish toy company. In advance of the gathering in Boston, InnoLead connected with Donaldson to learn about the group’s mission; how he makes the case for early beta-testing of new ideas; and why “silent demos” are important.
In the video above, Donaldson explains that his team’s mandate is “to invent the future of play. That’s the explicit external mission. The internal mission is really to keep the LEGO brand and the LEGO brick that everybody knows and loves relevant for the next generation of consumers. Now, the LEGO brand and the LEGO mission is not just to sell stuff. It really is to grow what we call the ‘builders of tomorrow’ — to inspire kids, to inspire creative folks…”
“What we’re trying to do is leverage the assets that we have, whether that’s the factories, or whether that’s our brand, or whether that’s our user base of really committed fans that we’re really fortunate the LEGO Group has. So that’s kind of the other phase of the mission — to think about how the brand will transform itself, from where it is today, using the fans and the assets and all the love that we have, and what does become in 5, 10, 15 years time?”
How do you make the case for early beta-testing of new concepts?
What is a ‘silent demo’?
(Featured image by Giampiero Fanni on Unsplash.)
