The Prisoner & The Penguin

 

Lego has a history of involving its customers and its fans in its innovation. It famously recruited a group of adult superfans when it wanted to develop its Brainstorm 2 product.

So when it recruited a group of children to help it develop a new Technic product, it might not have seemed that this was anything particularly new, but Lego weren’t the only people interested.

The children were shown early drawings and models of a possible futuristic autonomous construction machine and asked for feedback and to come up with any ideas they had which might improve it.

Amongst some other smaller improvements, the group came up with two big new ideas; a mapping drone and something which they called “the Eye”.

The drone would hover above the vehicle and allow it to have a wider view of its surroundings so it can be ‘aware’ of things that might be out of its normal line of sight.

 

 

The ‘Eye’ was an adjustable camera boom mounted on the top of the vehicle which would will show exactly where the vehicle’s “attention” was being directed. This means it can make “eye contact” with people in and around the building site and acknowledge their presence.

What made this so different is the fact that with most autonomous machines, people can’t see all the sensors that it uses to steer itself and navigate around both stationary and moving objects. The Eye solved this problem, making the ‘interaction’ between humans and machine as safe and intuitive as possible.

Both ideas are being incorporated in the new Lego technic Zeux Concept Wheel Loader product that will be launched in August.

The twist however was that Lego were not the only ones interested in the results, the project was in fact a joint venture between Lego and Volvo.

As Arvid Rinaldo, Brand Communication and Partners Director at Volvo said: “They thought they gave feedback on a Lego model, but at the same time they actually gave feedback on a real construction machine…the Zeux paves the way for our future construction machines.”

It is a wonderful example of harnessing different thinking and working in partnership with other brands and your customers – present and future.

Recently a number of U.K. food manufacturers have started to talk about “From farm to fork” the process they go through from harvesting their crops to you cooking and eating it. It’s their way of talking about the authenticity and quality of their products.

The French phrase ‘la fleur au flacon’ – the flower into the bottle – predates this and relates not to food but to perfume, and to the legendary Chanel No.5 in particular.

However the extraordinary attention to the detail involved in the production of Chanel No.5 helps explain both its uniqueness and perhaps its price too.

It’s a process, perhaps better called a recipe that starts in Joseph Mul’s fields near Pégomas. The fields have been in the Mul family since the early nineteen-hundreds and are where the Rosa centifolia or “hundred petal” roses grow. Their frilly, dishevelled heads often bow under their weight of all those petals but they produce a clear, sweet, honeyed scent. A scent that is as distinctive as the aroma from a French wine from a particular region is to a Master of Wine.

When the roses are in full bloom, often in late May, the entire fifty acres must be harvested in two weeks. Seventy pickers and four videurs have to cull over thirty tons of flowers. Each and every head picked in a particular way – “One finger over, one finger under, then twist! You can hear the snap” explains Mul.

Once harvested, the oils from the roses must be extracted quickly as once picked they start to ferment. Even after two or three minutes, the smell starts to subtly change.

Three to five hundred rose heads make a kilo and the videurs fill sacks of ten kilos apiece. These are then immediately loaded them onto a flatbed truck. Within an hour, the roses are delivered to an on-site factory.

The sacks of roses are transferred into a giant metal vat and workers use pitchforks to even out the piles before two thousand litres of hexane, a colourless liquid solvent is added and heated it to exactly sixty-eight degrees Celsius. The vat is reopened and the petal have changed from pink to brown.

From here the remaining liquid imbued with the essence of all those roses are turned into a waxy solid known perhaps surprisingly as concrete before being distilled in an absolute, a highly concentrated oil that goes directly into the perfume

And this is just the roses.

Each thirty-millilitre bottle of Chanel No. 5 contains the scent from a thousand Pégomas jasmine flowers, twelve Pégomas roses and a number of other carefully selected and prepared ingredients too.

Olivier Polge, Chanel’s head perfumer, or “nose,” has said with an unplanned reference to ‘from farm to fork’ “A living material gives you an identity that no synthetic can give. People think of perfume as something elusive, but I really like this feet-in-the-mud side to it.”