A pretty good rule for co-creation is to start with something people are already creating. This worked well for Walker's, who developed a very successful promotion, Do Us A Flavour, around the insight that everyone has a favourite flavour of crisps and loves to talk about it.
Although a part of the incentive for people to submit their flavour was a 1% share of profit from the new flavour for ever, the project was a marketing idea with a business model attached. Nothing wrong with that - it's a great campaign - but Cuusoo from Lego feels more fundamental. More like a new way of doing business with some marketing attached.
The idea is simple. Design the Lego model that you think other Lego fans will like, submit it to the community and if it gets 10,000 'likes' then a panel of Lego designers will assess it for market-worthiness. If the panel thinks the idea is strong enough then Lego will turn it into a kit and give you 1% of profits they generate from it for 5 years.
This is brilliant for 3 simple reasons. First, everyone who's ever played with Lego moves quickly from the models Lego sell to the models they can build themselves, so there's an infinite supply of potential new kits. Second, there's already a very healthy (and vocal) Lego community built over years of successful social and CRM activity, so assessing the likeability of a potential new model is easy. And finally, even if a kit isn't produced, the possibilility that their model may end up in a Lego box on shelves worldwide is enough to make any Lego fan a die-hard advocate.
One of the mistakes marketers make with co-creation is to force a behaviour that isn't natural. You can get people to do pretty much anything (even make ads) if you make the incentive compelling enough. But you're always going to have more success, and the quality of co-creation is always going to be better, if you incentivise something that people already do - whether that's talking about their favourite crisps or building an amazing Lego model.
It looks like Cuusoo kits are available only in Japan at the minute. Any new business model needs to be tested but I reckon Lego are onto a winner here. If they can cope with the demand they should open the floodgates. They'll only lock their fans in more when they do.
Final word: this is my son's new Lego blog. I promised him I'd plug it!