I was in Vail all last week skiing (fresh powder every day!). On the last ski day, Saturday, the crew I was with decided to pop over to Beaver Creek for something different. On the walk to the main lift we passed a full sized Volvo with a chassis made entirely of Lego blocks. Really, the only non-Lego parts that were visible were the tires. It was so realistic, most people walking by dismissed it as just another car promotion and didnt even realize the thing was made of Legos!

This experience reminded me of the Lego case study in the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. In that book, the authors point out how Lego came to embrace customers developing their own creations. When I got back to the Condo having survived my last day of skiing, I visited the Lego web site to see some of this creativity first hand. As you might expect, a good number of these creations are pretty cheesy and amateurish. But there are several that raise an eyebrow and a few that look better than most of the Lego kits available at toy stores. More noteworthy is the community of designers is global and passionate and their creativity is freely supplied to Lego. It made me wish I cared a little more about building things out of Lego blocks just so I could participate and be one of them.

But I dont. As a consummate analyst, Im more interested in the dynamics associated with creating a platform like Lego has, engaging a community to enthusiastically give of their knowledge and creativity, and how business models are reshaped to respond.

So Sunday we had to pack up and head home. I had carefully planned a flight that would get me back home, unpacked, and in my easy chair in time for the Super Bowl kickoff. But as a broken plane, bad weather, and many delayed flights would have it, I was sitting in airport bar at kickoff and watched most the game from there. The game was on Fox and hosted by the Fox NFL crew. As always, there was the little Fox NFL robot guy bouncing around in the lower left corner of the screen whenever they were showing rosters or statistics or basically doing anything other than showing the game. Ive never cared one way or another for the little Fox NFL robot to me, he is just noise and immaterial to what matters. But for the first time, the little guy caught my eye. He suddenly started having a fight with a Terminator robot (click here to go to the MySpace page that has all the Super Bowls Ads - the Fox NFL Terminator ones are at the bottom of the page under “FOX NFL PROMOS”). Then I realized that it was part of a promotion to get people to watch a new Terminator series airing on Fox. Pretty clever, actually. I doubt Ill watch the show, but the promotion worked in the sense that I am now aware of it.

Probably because I had the whole Lego thing still in my mind, I started thinking about this little Fox NFL Robot-dude and what it could accomplish for Fox if it were more of an open platform. Imagine if there was an API that you could use to direct the Robots actions, or a way to write plug-ins to extend the capability set of what the robot could do. Since the robot is usually the last thing on the screen before a commercial break or the first thing on the screen after the commercials have run, some clever advertisers could seamlessly integrate a commercial with the actual show. You could show the robot relaxing with a beer on a Caribbean beach, doing exercises at a fitness club, or losing weight on Nutrisystems. The opportunities would be infinite. The brand image would grow the more the little guy came to life. The more open he was to change, the more Fox could benefit from the work of others. If someone wrote behavior that made him liquefy, Fox (and others) could reuse that behavior later when it helped create a desired effect. There would be abuses as well, but on the whole Fox would benefit by greater openness of this little avatar.

But I doubt they will see it this way. As a major media outlet, they will likely be more driven towards seeing value in guarding proprietary rights than in what can become of something in the hands of the masses. As such, little Fox NFL dude will never really have a full life. He will be a slave to the limited budget and talents of a few people at Fox, bloggers will ridicule him, and most (like me) will ignore him. How sad.