Playing Well = Serious Business. Or: From Space Oddity to Space Necessity?

Friday Nonsense?, entry #412:?in space, everyone will breathlessly watch you innovate.

Recommended listening[1]: Pink Floyd’s ‘Just Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 1’ —Spotify mini-playlist here , set to collab mode. Add to it if you're so inclined.

(Complimentary dad joke: Biggest complaint about that new moon restaurant? “No atmosphere”.)

“I thought the attractions of being an astronaut were actually, not so much the moon, but flying in a completely new medium.” - Neil Armstrong

There are about as many ways to innovate as there are roads to Rome. I’ve written about combinatorial innovation before , as it’s one of my faves. Essentially, this approach to creating something new revolves around taking a fresh look at what you’ve got (in your organization, tech stack, garden or jumbled box of Lego bricks). Think smartphone—more of a mash-up of existing technologies than a net-new innovation.

The kicker, though, is its multiplier—once you combine multiple things into an innovation, you have more options to innovate as that new innovation now possesses different qualities, providing you entirely combination possibilities you didn't have before. Now, that collection of 'stuff' can jump a weight class. (Martin L. Weitzman’s expressing this as “an ideas-based growth model” in his “Recombinant Growth”[2] essay a couple decades back remains as good a semantic hook to this as any).

The Space Necessity Bit

While there many combinatorial innovation examples, very few of them occurred simultaneously on Earth and in space. Remember that ‘square peg, round hole’[3] scene in the movie Apollo 13? That mission was supposed to be pretty quotidian—third trip to the moon for the U.S., nothing super-groundbreaking etc. (Plus, the planet was very much preoccupied with itself at the moment, as the Beatles had begun consciously uncoupling the day prior[4] ).

You all know the story—bad wiring leads to a fire, the crew flees the command module (CM) to seek refuge in the lunar module (LM). With CO2 concentrations increasing, the astronauts were running out of breathable air. While they had square filters for the CM, they needed round ones for the LM’s air supply system.?Houston gets famously notified that they’ve got a problem and, ideating with only the objects available[5] on the spacecraft, solves it[6] .

How Does This Relate to Biggest Toymaker in the World?

I tend to be a serial enthusiast, with some enthusiasms remaining constant over time—two consistent ones are succulents and Lego (side-note: Jason Wong 's bonsai game is on point). One of our kids?gifted me Lego’s succulent set[7] . In assembling it, I noticed a familiar piece—"that looks like a hat!" That got me wondering about the other 770 pieces covering our kitchen table and whether all of them were from previous sets as well.?

I had questions, no answers and no idea where to start. An anonymous product developer at Lego, a super-knowledgeable customer service rep named Kathy and a tremendously nice and lore-deep data science prof who's also an admin on Bricks Stack Exchange were kind enough to lend a hand.?

That set, in fact, did not contain a single net-new brick. Given the thousands of individual piece molds that Lego has developed over the years, it makes sense there’s a significant organizational system to track all of them—and an organizational imperative to ‘use what you’ve got’. While Lego does introduce plenty of new elements (209 in March of this year alone ), designing and building new molds takes more effort than repurposing existing ones. That flower bulb in my set? A dinosaur egg from a previous one. This aloe plant leaf? A talon. You get the idea. What the designer did do for several pieces was inject a different color into an existing mold—going back to Weitzman’s idea, increasing the size of their combinatorial playing field.

More Than Bricks

Lego as an org is no stranger to innovation, having reinvented itself numerous times (sometimes with intent, sometimes by necessity[8] ) since their founding in 1934. After an over-diversification in the late ‘90s (theme parks, food products), they both went back to the core of what they do (the company’s name is derived from the Danish ‘leg godt’, translating to ‘play well’) and transformed how they went about it. You could think of them as a platform company—every set they release is an extension of their basic product design. They’ve got a long history with MIT , and are in fact moving U.S. HQ from Enfield, CT to Boston in part for proximity reasons.

Fun fact? From a technical standpoint, Lego is the single largest tire manufacturer in the world – they produce over 300M rubber tires annually.

Third-party, after-market products are always interesting to observe. You’ll find out pretty quickly what customer need wasn’t originally considered by the OEM during development. Often incredibly innovative, sometimes hilarious. Given how outsized a reaction to stepping barefoot on something so small can be, we refer to errant Lego pieces ‘the littlest assassin’ in our house. As a kid, I saw an ad in game magazine for slippers designed specifically to prevent that. (Lego itself got into that game years later , demonstrating that learning from the market’s reaction to your stuff is yet another form of innovation.)

?TL;DR? Carpenter worried about his main gig starts a side-hustle making wooden toys, global toy empire is born[9] .

Happy Friday, all.

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[1] Alternative tuneage: The Maccabee’s ‘Lego’, Philip Sheppard’s ‘MIT’, Monster Magnet’s ‘Space Lord’, L7’s ‘Pretend We’re Dead’ (from their wonderful ‘Bricks Are Heavy’) and several other songs in that playlist

[2] “Recombinant Growth”, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (May 1998) by Martin L. Weitzman. Worth a look, link to pdf here

[3] The term itself goes back way farther, a delightful bit of British vernacular by Sydney Sweeney, dropped during a lecture series at the Royal Institution in the early 1800s. More expansive quote here, via Wikipedia: “If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes, […] and the person acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly, that we can say they were almost made for each other.” (Some 150 years later, American writer Irving Wallace would borrow the term for his book “The Square Pegs: Some Americans Who Dared to Be Different”. Neither here nor there, Wallace served in Frank Capra’s unit, along with none other than Dr. Seuss.)

[4] In reality, the Beatles were kind of dunzo already, but a press misquote led to the famously breathless “Paul is quitting the Beatles” Daily Mirror front page. Details here

[5] Perhaps the only time in human history where a box of space junk saved human lives, preventing them from becoming actual space junk. Semi-related – I used to consult at 富士通 , they developed a cool, quantum-inspired space debris tracking and removal solution. Deets here .

[6] Small infographic on how they did it here

[7] Set 10309, released early 2022 and part of their Botanical Collection

[8] Great detail on this in David Robertson’s and Bill Breen’s book “Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry”

[9] Deets here