LEGO – The Health Care Blog

Brick by Brick by (Smart) Brick

Jan 7, 2026

By KIM BELLARD

I’m an innovation junkie, the further out there the better, but every so often it’s good to be reminded that just because a company has been around for a while, innovation is still possible.

Two examples: LEGO® and Kodak.

Let’s start with LEGO. If you are around any small children – and perhaps not even all that small – you probably have seen them playing with Legos. Legos have been around, in various incarnations, for longer than I’ve been alive, and that’s saying something. Most adults watching kids assemble their Legos probably have two reactions: “gosh, I wish they’d make them even more complicated” (note to the oblivious reader – that was sarcastic), and “well, at least they’re not on their screens.”

So I bet a lot of us have a slightly surprised reaction to Lego’s announcement Monday Jan 6th to CES 2026: LEGO SMART Play™.

The key innovation is the SMART Brick, which “is packed with technologies that bring play to life including sensors, accelerometers, light sensing and a sound sensor as well as a miniature speaker driven by an onboard synthesiser, and much more, in addition to easy wireless charging.” All that is powered by a custom chip, which is smaller than one of the studs on a LEGO brick.

The LEGO Group states: “Without any setup, SMART Bricks are magically ‘aware’ of each other’s positions and orientations in 3D space, thanks to a novel, high-accuracy, magnetic positioning system. They can also communicate via a self-organizing network that adapts to play. Advanced onboard systems let SMART Bricks comprehend and interact with each other, as well as the fans building with them.” “Magic” in this context meaning Bluetooth.

Nerdist calls it “the most exciting innovation in screenless play ever,”

What is Health Care’s LEGO?

Feb 8, 2023

BY KIM BELLARD

Last week the esteemed Jane Sarasohn-Kahn celebrated that it was the 65^th anniversary of the famous LEGO brick, linking to Jay Ong’s blog article about it (to be more accurate, it was the 65^th anniversary of the patent for the LEGO brick). That led me to read Jens Andersen’s excellent history of the company: The LEGO Story: How a Little Toy Sparked the World’s Imagination.

But I didn’t think about writing about LEGO’s until I read Ben’s Cohen’s Wall Street Journal profile of University of Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg, who studies why projects succeed or fail. His advice: “That’s the question every project leader should ask: What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big thing? What’s our Lego?”

So I had to wonder: OK, healthcare – what’s your LEGO?

Professor Flyvbjerg specializes in “megaprojects” — large, complex, and expensive projects. His new book, co-authored with Dan Gardner, is How Big Things Get Done. Not to spoil the surprise (which would only be a surprise to anyone who hasn’t been part of one), their finding is that such projects usually get done poorly. Professor Flyvbjerg’s “Iron Rule of Megaprojects” is that they are “over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.”

In fact, by his calculations, 99.5% of such projects miss the mark: only 0.5% are delivered on budget, on time, and with the expected benefits. Only 8.5% are even delivered on budget and on time; 48% are at least delivered on budget, but not on time or with expected benefits.

As Professor Flyvbjerg says: “You shouldn’t expect that they will go bad. You should expect that quite a large percentage will go disastrously bad.”

He has two key pieces of advice. First, take your time in the planning process: “think slow, act fast.” As Dr. Flyvbjerg and Mr. Gardner wrote in a Harvard Business Review article recently, “When projects are launched without detailed and rigorous plans, issues are left unresolved that will resurface during delivery, causing delays, cost overruns, and breakdowns….Eventually, a project that started at a sprint becomes a long slog through quicksand.”

Second, and this is where we get to the LEGOs, is to make the project modular; as Mr. Cohen puts it, “Find the Lego that simplifies your work and makes it modular.”