The solution
In an October 2013 Fast Company item based on a Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal report, Minnesota-based Kroll Ontrack, a data recovery firm, needed to hand-clean 5,200 damaged tapes for a $600,000 job. It did not have enough staff to hand-clean them, and no tools existed to automate the task.
Engineer Thomas Hanselmann was at home building a Lego bulldozer with his son when he realized that the kit's motor, which propels the bulldozer forward, could be reconfigured into an automatic tape cleaner. The improvised Lego tape cleaner worked.
CEO Dean Hager calls such a moment a Lego moment: having a complex problem and finding a simple yet elegant solution.
Why it worked
Hand-cleaning 5,200 tapes needed more people than the firm had.
No commercial tool automated the task.
A toy kit already contained a motor that could drive the motion needed.
Building from the kit was faster than designing a machine from nothing.
What can be applied
When no tool exists, look at cheap off-the-shelf parts with the one function you need, before designing from scratch.
Aftermath
Kroll earned more than $600,000 in sales from the job. The Lego machine is still in operation and additional copies were made in Kroll's European offices.
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