WHARTON PARTNERSHIP EVENT WITH PROFESSOR DAVID ROBERTSON
Thursday, February 20, 2014
In June 2003, a young ex-consultant named Jørgen Vig Knudstorp presented the results of his internal study to the Board of LEGO. In a devastating report, he told them that 2003 was going to be a terrible year and 2004 was likely to be worse. The company had defaulted on its loans, was running out of cash, and might not survive.
How did LEGO get in such trouble? In a word, innovation. LEGO’s managers had followed the advice of academics and consultants – advice that is still being given today – about how to manage innovation: head for blue ocean markets, practice creative disruption, build an innovation culture. That advice almost led LEGO to ruin.
After verifying Knudstorp’s findings, the Board restructured the management team and appointed him CEO. Within two years, Knudstorp and his team had fundamentally redesigned how LEGO managed innovation, and built one of the most sophisticated innovation systems in the world. Today, LEGO is the most profitable and fastest growing company in the toy industry, growing sales at 24% per year and profits at 40% per year, every year since 2007.
In this talk we will explore how LEGO redesigned its innovation system to both boost the rate and focus the direction of its innovation efforts. We will discuss how LEGO’s management team steered the company through its greatest crisis. We will show the specific mechanisms that LEGO implemented to boost and focus innovation. We will talk about which of those could be applied to your company, and how they can be put into action.
Register Online [SOLD OUT!]
Date: Thursday, February 20, 2014
Time: 6:00pm to 8:30pm
Location: Wharton | San Francisco, 2 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA 94105
Cost: Free to attend.
About Professor David Robertson
David C. Robertson joined the faculty of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in January of 2011, and was Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland from 2002 through 2010. As the LEGO Professor at IMD, Robertson was given unique access to the company’s management team, has written two case studies about the company, and is the co-author of a Harvard Business Review piece on LEGO. At IMD, Robertson was the co-director of the school’s largest executive education program, the Program for Executive Development, and directed programs for Credit Suisse, EMC, HSBC, Skanska, BT, and other leading European companies. Visit
www.RobertsonInnovation.com and follow
@davidcrob.
