#1387 1998 · LEGO (Mindstorms) · Toys / robotics kits
LEGO met firmware hackers with a 'right to hack' license, then hired them for the next kit
the problem
Within weeks of launch, hackers cracked Mindstorms' proprietary firmware and posted it online
background
LEGO's Mindstorms robotics kit launched in 1998, and within weeks a Stanford graduate student, Kekoa Proudfoot, reverse-engineered the RCX brick's firmware and published it. Engineers built on it — an open-source operating system called LegOS, a C-like language called NQC — and dozens of websites collected robot programs LEGO never imagined: soda machines, blackjack dealers, toilet scrubbers. A 1999 survey found 70 percent of Mindstorms users were adults.
LEGO's leadership debated lawsuits: protecting intellectual property was, as an executive put it, very high on the agenda, and some feared cannibalized accessory sales and confused customers. After months of wait-and-see the company decided that limiting creativity contradicted the product's own mission — and instead of cease-and-desist letters, it wrote a right to hack into the Mindstorms software license, explicitly permitting hobbyist modification.
what everyone would do
Send cease-and-desist letters and lock the firmware down — protecting each accessory sale at the price of amputating a community that was writing your software, documentation and marketing for free.
what they saw
The hackers were not stealing the product; they were finishing it. Grant the right and the best become unpaid, self-selected co-developers — suing them would have destroyed LEGO's own R&D pipeline.
the move
Tolerance became strategy. LEGO recruited four of the most expert fans into a Mindstorms User Panel, who worked eleven months essentially as unpaid staff — compensated in Lego sets and prototypes, traveling to Denmark at their own expense — shaping the successor kit's sensors, ports and firmware; one fan suggestion resurrected an L-shaped joint from an abandoned prototype mold. After the NXT's unveiling at CES in January 2006, LEGO recruited a hundred more volunteer testers and the panel grew to fourteen.
why it works
The hackers revealed demand LEGO could not see — adults, educators, researchers — and produced tools (an alternative OS, a C-like language, third-party sensors) that expanded what the kit could do, raising its value at zero cost to LEGO. The license grant converts legal enemies into evangelists while costing nothing; the User Panel filters the community's best contributors and gives them ownership of the successor, buying eleven months of expert labor for the price of Lego sets; and a product shaped by lead users arrives pre-fitted to the most demanding customers, with forty-plus third-party guidebooks doing the documentation free.
the payoff
Mindstorms 2.0 sold 40,000 units a year at $199 with zero advertising; ~1M kits sold; the fan co-designed NXT launched at $249 in 2006
where it breaks
It presumes hackers improve rather than divert: where modification enables genuine harm or circumvents paid features, a blanket right to hack is reckless. It needs a product whose value grows with tinkering — a sealed consumable gains nothing. And co-creation can cede the roadmap to a narrow elite of hardcore users whose appetite for complexity does not always match the mass market the product also needs.
what came after
The story became the canonical case of user innovation and manufacturer co-creation, cited across the management literature from von Hippel's school to the Journal of Marketing; unpaid expert panels shaping products spread as a practice across hobbyist industries.
references
- [1]Geeks in Toyland (Wired 14.02)Wired, 2006wired.com
- [2]The Lego-bots are comingCNET, 2006cnet.com