Lego. We all loved these brick-like plastic pieces to build castles, dragons, cars or the star-wars chip.

But when these lego bricks suddenly transform to a digital product because some technological add-on or motor has been topped on, we were the biggest fans of all times. Lego Cars, Lego Robots and so forht

In fact, it has only been a week I was attending Web Summit in Lisbon. I honestly did not listen to a lot of talks as I knew they would be available on-line after the event, but for some talks and topics I could not resist. Legos was one of them.

It was about the fact that companies would need to shift their focus from looking outside their firm to find innovation but rather to exploit effectively the resources they had. Their employees but also their clients. Lego is the most engaging brand in the world on social media and that all because Lego uses its social channels and feeds to kid's and creative's challenges. By calling for their community to come up with new ideas or join a wave of existing ideas with competitions, they also solve two problems at the same time: customer engagement and idea sourcing from outside. How were they able to do this? Their internal social media and idea development team sits together every Monday with the sole purpose to launch a new challenge or idea for the community. The whole Monday is dedicated to experimentation. At the end of the day, the idea with the most votes will be casted in the shooting on Tuesday and published by Wednesday. Thursday and Friday are used to evaluate the campaigns and lessons learned from the previous week. Sometimes, the challenges can become self-drivers and grow to a movement like the Lego Man that went on travels in the world. This social feed is years old and still there are a few hundred uploads a day. Sometimes, new ideas emerge from previous campaigns so the system becomes a closed cycle of innovation: idea generation, deployment, sharing, replication, evaluation, idea generation. Incredible!