Failure Of Innovation Can Be Good

Failure Of Innovation Can Be Good

By:


Failure is a fact of life for innovation teams, and rates of 80% or more are not uncommon.

But not all failures are bad. Some can have extremely positive consequences.

A good failure is one which teaches an organisation something. Usually, these lessons will have been learnt after a certain amount of investment has been made. The best failures are those where the lessons have been bought at the smallest possible cost. In other words, the innovation team has cancelled a project early.

In an organisational culture that applauds good failure, the money spent on a cancelled project is seen as investment that's able to support the innovation team in their future work.

On the other hand, of course, there's bad failures. Usually these are typified by failing to reveal any new information whilst simultaneously costing a huge amount of money because they weren't stopped early enough.

For many organisations, its hard enough to celebrate good failures. So you can imagine how very difficult things become for innovation people when they have to explain a series of bad failures. Most of the time, a series of bad failures will be all it takes to kill an innovation programme once and for all.

On the other hand, many organisations are great at accepting failure. They've recognised that they need sophisticated innovation processes to ensure their failures are directed into new unique things that work.

Now, let's do some math.

If one in five things attempted are going to fail, then the remaining success has to be good enough to pay for the four things that went wrong. Otherwise, your innovation efforts are going to be loss making.

What is the best way to ensure this doesn't happen? Obviously, by concentrating attention on maximising the number of good failures - those which don't cost much.

The natural corollary of this, of course, is that you should delay investment in new things as long as possible - certainly long enough to ensure you've removed as many risks of failure as possible.


About the Author:
If you'd like to read more about innovation failure, you can go to James A Gardner's free online book which explains how to start an innovation programme.



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


|

Loading...
Related....
Videos...

Recent Innovation Articles

Comments

Still can't find what you are looking for? Search for it!

Loading

Copyright 2005-2011 ArticleSnatch, LLC - All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy | Terms of Service.