Lego Competitive Intelligence: Mindstorm vs. Arduino

The M2M Evolution Conference and Expo focuses on the business opportunities for enterprises and carriers that can create efficiency. It is classic ROI analysis at its best and makes for good community development. For that reason, I have a tendency to shy away from such things as e-readers and consumer products. Even when we talk about enabling the consumer, we do so from a business standpoint of Kiosks and other POS solutions.

In keeping with the idea of consumer enablement, I want to talk directly (directly via this article, anyway) to the folks at Lego. I know I should probably be writing this in Danish; however my understanding is that the Lego team speaks English well and has become quite the marketing powerhouse. For decades, Lego thought it was delivering new packages only to kids, unaware of how many adult hobbyists were out there fiercely loyal to the Lego brand. In recent years, Lego has overcome their myopia, however, and today they not only deliver high-end solutions to people that allow them to replicate great architecture, but also M2M sensor solutions via their Mindstorms product line. The Lego market, though, easily dwarfs Mindstorms even on YouTube, as evidenced by the stats.

Of course, some of the dwarfing may be due to the “Lego Star Wars” television program, but even so, that means there is a lot of still photography (transformed into the Lego equivalent of Claymation) that is dwarfing something that actually moves. Mind you, I know of many universities that have engineering projects that make use of Mindstorms products, though often these projects are little more than attempts to perfect Beer Pong abilities (and I would assume we could do a test on human performance versus the Mindstorms, based on alcohol consumed).

Now that we’ve had some fun, let’s get to the point of this article. Lego’s Mindstorms is a great way to investigate the possibilities of M2M solutions. I have seen people prototype large scale solutions using Mindstorms products, and even solve a Rubik’s cube (see video below).

When you look at Arduino boards and their adoption by a rich community of users (including my friend Jared Gold (who replaced his travel organ with a self designed organ using an Arduino board), you see a much richer opportunity.  For my voice communication followers, Arduino boards are like the Asterisk solutions for the M2M community. They are open source and very pliable, with their programming a subset of C / C+ on top of Linux.   So people can write on a Linux box.

Arduino is Open Source Hardware…yes, hardware...and several manufacturers are already making compliant boards.  The richness of this community and its open source nature suggests a few strategies that I would enact if I were Lego. First, I would evaluate existing hardware companies for the purposes of community adoption and possible acquisition. Second, I would look at what kind of Mindstorms augmentation these companies could add to the mix for their existing communities (the cross-elastic effects are the reason why this is the second strategy). Then, as a follow-on to the Mindstorms with Arduino set, I would look to see what I could do to provide a scripting program. Finally, I would make a Lego plastic circuit board series for those who want to show off their Arduino solutions and how they were built. 

Lego Mindstorms may be stuck in the Innovator’s Dilemma when it comes to supporting the M2M and Engineering community, however if Lego is as smart as I think they are, they are likely already closing this gap. If not, though, please feel free to send this around the office in Billund, Denmark…I’d be happy to do the first reviews.