個案總覽

The case presents the strategic dilemma faced by the company's leaders, especially Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, Executive Chairman of the LEGO Brand Group. In 2021, Niels Christiansen (CEO of the LEGO Group) was celebrating the financial results that the LEGO Group had obtained the previous year, a period in which they achieved the highest sales peak in the company's history, despite the complexity brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. The LEGO Group was the largest of the four units grouped under the LEGO Brand Group umbrella. It generated 70 % of the revenue of the LEGO® brand business, and was the main source of income for Kirkbi, the holding company of the Kristiansen family. Nearly ninety years after its founding, the LEGO Group still relied on the world-famous LEGO® brick and the philosophy of learning through play. Over the past two years, the LEGO Group had stepped up investments to drive expansion into other regions and had bet on innovations in the brick-based play and retail ecosystem. However, there were still many missing pieces in the strategic consciousness. The LEGO Group had not been able to carve out a niche in the video game market and had not yet developed a new growth engine that would diversify the traditional brick brand. Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, now at the head of the governing body managing the LEGO® businesses, had to come up with a vision that would lay the foundation for the future of the brand's business. The case creates discussion spaces for students to deliberate on the strategic decisions to be made and how to carry them out. The story starts from the LEGO Group's beginnings, in 1932, and describes the most notable strategic moves through 2020; from the "pieces", or founding moments, through the "pieces" of diversification, repair, transformation, entrepreneurship and expansion. Thus, it describes the strategies that each CEO devised to overcome the company's circumstances.

The case provides a detailed description of the various significant points in time or company milestones, since the launching of the concept, the growth of the franchise in Venezuela, the internationalization process in Europe, and the development of new formats. Each of these landmarks is an opportunity in itself to explain different elements of the Lean Startup method applied to a franchise. The case's focus, along with the strategic decision or choice of the entrepreneurs must make to channel sustainability, is placed on how to validate and manage some of the alternatives chosen. The experience lived by the Decofruta team is an example of how -empirically- a business may resort to a validated learning approach prior to allocating time and resources to develop something that is only in the minds of its creators. It also pinpoints the consequences of investing time, money and passion in a product or service that does not add value to the customer.