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@timf @joshhall I had to unexpectedly pull the trigger on a date today. Friday, 4/17 – we have the whole day available to us on 2nd floor, Sennott Square – corner of Forbes/S.Bouquet St. above the Panera Bread. I have several rooms blocked off, including tables. Everything we need for presentations and exhibitions are there. I’ll have volunteers to act as docents, too, for any work exhibited. More details coming, but I had to book the spaces today or not have any at all. I’m expected a few hundred people to pass through Sennott on that Friday.
That is great. Is anyone in the LUG who has done Commission work able to give a talk about the business side of the hobby? I think that would be fascinating.
Also, I can be there all day but I will have to work most of the time when I am not presenting. But I should be able to oversee displays, etc. while I am working.
@timf This is great! I’ll have student volunteers on hand to act as docents too should you need to take a call or need private space, which I can provide in the form of my office.
I just did a huge sweeping call for participation from Pitt’s engineering, education, and computer science colleges, so we’ll see what turns up there.
We’re going to have about 200-500 people pass through on this day. I definitely need LUG Doug for social media. Students will love it. lol
@joshhall – your Cathedral model is getting a lot of great attention on campus right now, definitely need to include it in this event.@iamrjthompson, @timf, I’m also good with Friday 4/17 to bring the Incline there to display. The Incline itself fits nicely on a standard 6 ft. x 2.5 ft. table. I’d want to locate the table close to an outlet so I can plug in to run the cars. It will take me at least an hour to set it up, so if you want it to be up and running by the 9 am start we’ll need to plan arrival and unloading accordingly. Sounds like you’re going to be at the Q1 meeting, so we can talk more about it then.
9 am start
I was thinking we should probably arrive no later than 7:30-8:00 am (and hopefully beat some of the rush hour traffic). That would give an hour or so to set up the displays.
Who is the audience for the business talk?
1. Small business entrepreneur types? If so, they might find it interesting to hear about the army of entrepreneurs selling to LEGO fans, and the recent acquisition of BrickLink.
2. Staff at larger corporations? Then you could look at toy companies and the dynamics of operating in a market dominated by one big fish, in this case construction toys in the consumer market and robots in the education market (comparable to search engines in the shadow of Google search, such as DuckDuckGo which considers it a win if they get 2% of the search market).
3. Or if the audience is more patent/IP, global startup oriented, then looking at LEGO’s history of patents, trademarks, and ultimately licensing as strategies for protecting and differentiating their product, including their failed attempt to trademark the shape of the brick itself and MegaBlocks opening the floodgates for competing brick manufacturers by standing up to LEGO and soldiering through a very expensive lawsuit. I imagine many consumers must have noticed the explosion in competing kits that resulted, which is a good touch point.
4. Or manufacturing (Pittsburgh is a manufacturing town after all) and distribution–that might be the closest match to the ideas proposed for the talk.
It’s all juicy stuff. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
Hi @rachelh !
The primary audience for this event is University of Pittsburgh students, 18-24, though the event is open to the public. Specifically, this grant was funded under the premise of serving the Pitt undergraduate and graduate business students, with a secondary audience of the broader campus. That’s the audience(s). These are students that are going to school for things like accounting, supply chain management, marketing, business information technology, human resources, international business, finance, and a wealth of minors ranging from engineering to the humanities.
I think all of the points you raise could be merged into one cohesive talk – and they are all excellent points. We’ll bring these up with our conversation with LEGO corporate on Monday. Would you like to help us flesh out the agenda for this talk? I’d love to have your help!
@RJ Thompson Sure thing! Let me know how I can help. Not sure if keeping it in this thread is easiest or if you had something else in mind.
How long is the talk?
@rachelh the talk shouldn’t be more than an hour. There is also an artist talk at no more than an hour. PM/call/add? Let’s take this off forum.
facebook.com/robertjthompson
4127797665 call/text@timf I found a 3d printed model of the Cathedral for your reference, though Josh’s is pretty good too….
Download:
https://pitt.box.com/s/qyqlboq6fraa9u6r1mh9dxh7gt9oj1ow@rachelh I spoke with Skip Kodak head of LEGO North America. He’s tentatively agreed to do a Skype call presentation on the business of LEGO!
@rachelh haha yeah, that escalated quickly – bearing that in mind, I would still love to have any help you can offer.
I found a 3d printed model of the Cathedral for your reference
Thanks, RJ. I have completed a model which I will bring to Q1 on Saturday. It stands at 598 parts and Bricklink’s out to about $52 for one copy (I did a spreadsheet 🙂 ). Depending upon how many we would want, that might be a bit steep based on the overall grant.
Sure thing. Maybe we can come up with some bullet points to shape the talk, to give this guy a starting point.
@rachelh this link isn’t ‘public’ yet, but wanted you to be aware of it. https://cba.pitt.edu/lego/
It certainly looks good to me, but I don’t have the professional experience Rachel does when it comes to analyzing something like that.
I did find what appears to be a typo, in case you want to fix that before it goes live, I’m not sure you intended to have a capital R here (unless it’s supposed to be an acronym for BRAT), this is from the section near the bottom on Tim:
In his BRick Artist Talk
Hey @bengood921 thanks for catching that. I’ll fix it. The whole page is kind of fluid at the moment. Skip isn’t totally confirmed, so there will likely be some changes. You are all welcome to share it with any parties that may be interested, just kindly request they keep it close to the chest until we do our formal announcement – probably next month.
I cannot remember, other than RJ and Tim, has the LUG committed to providing anything else for this event?
@greg still looking for volunteers from the LUG to commit showing their models in the exhibition. Please help!
still looking for volunteers from the LUG
The event is from 9AM to 5PM on a Friday. Just to clarify, would this mean setup on Thursday night and tear down on Friday night?
@greg drop off can occur the night before. we’ll lock all the models in my office and set them up that friday morning. Sennott is a relatively open and public space even in the evenings so I’d advise against set up the night before.
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