This week Christian Majgaard - the creative genius and former-senior director at Lego, who was one of the main people behind turning the toy manufacture into the global brand that we know today - sat down to talk to Newstalk's Down to Business.

During the 90s, Lego realised that it would need to realign its brand to stay relevant in the changing toy market - and that to do so it needed to look outside of the company and to start building relationships with theme parks, software companies, and Hollywood studios.

One of the first crossover ventures was a series of Star Wars toys - but this was not an easy idea to sell to the company's bosses:

"The first license deal we made was with the Star Wars people - and we were terribly afraid of the word war," he explains.

"Lego is a pacifist idea."

But after market research reassured the Danes that people associated Star Wars with action and adventure - not war and violence - the project got the green light and proved to be a massive success "from day one."

Once the company started to look outside of his own ranks to build new products like games or theme parks, Mr Majgaard explains that they wanted to only work with the best talent:

"One of the things that we learned is that if you want to do new things in a company that has been doing the very same thing for many years - you need to blend your own organisation with outsiders.

"You need to find the best manager from the theme park industry, you need to find the best guy that you can find from the software industry, and so forth - or else you can make terrible mistakes."

He left the company in 2000 - but Lego has stayed true to the ideas that it began to explore in the 90s, and Mr Majgaard has enjoyed watching it grow:

"What pleases me so much today is that every single one of those things that we started then [still] work well today. I would be lying if I said that that was an easy thing to create."

Since leaving Lego he has worked with the likes of Motorola, Nestle, Rabobank - offering advise to brands all over the world.

Listen back to the full interview here: