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Let’s Go! Failing Toward Innovation

The global economic shakedown of late has rattled and re-mixed global business; but more importantly, it’s reignited a passionate belief in creative resilience. A recent keyword search performed by the New York Times yielded 25,000 LinkedIn members with “innovation” in their job titles. This figure excludes the many more professionals who too dream, tinker, and craft the next great product, service, or business model that will change lives and move markets. The school of innovation has reemerged in force, crowning corporate dialogue as the golden arbiter of sustainable success, and wrapping the collective imagination of savvy designers and shrewd business minds alike in a halo of purpose.

In Innovate, Yes, but make it Practical, New York Times columnist Steve Lohr makes a notable move to ground innovation-speak in tangible principals and actionable strategies. Lohr writes, “business is a field not of theory but of practice” where “what works?” is the core inquiry. What works for innovation, according to Lohr’s research is explained by three professional guidelines:

1. Think broadly
2. Borrow from Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial model
3. Listen to customers and emerging user needs

And here I gesture to complete these guidelines with some innovation principles we believe at Speck:

4. Move quickly
5. Fail nimbly

The notion that failure is a rich opportunity for innovation has been a solution strategy since before innovation became the problem. However, in today’s business world where success is progress, progress is innovation, and advantage is speed-to-market, failure is less a question of if and more a practice of when, why, and how well it’s leveraged.

Crafting a Culture of Failure

Senior Aerospace Technician for NASA, Jen Scheer, makes a compelling argument that favors failure as an innovation strategy. In her Open NASA article,When Failure is Our Best Option, Scheer questions NASA’s internal use of the “failure is not an option” maxim. “We do not fail any less when a company instills the notion that failure is not an option,” says Scheer. In Scheer’s experience, this only encourages refusal to admit failure, retards ability to respond effectively, and ultimately delays arrival at a truly innovative solution.

GreenBiz.com’s recent coverage of the scientific discovery made by Oregon State University researchers provides an ideal example of failure strategy at work. Kaichang Li, a recent Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award winner, and his team of researchers set out to create a petrochemical-free temperature-sensitive adhesive from vegetable oil. While testing and analyzing what turned out to be a serial of failures, the team realized an opportunity to create an environmentally safe, pressure-sensitive adhesive. It can be created from a variety of vegetable oils, costs half the price of petrochemical based alternatives, and it all resulted from their team being open-enough to generate value from failed attempts.

However inspiring, the Oregon State researchers admittedly had a fairly open design brief. Shifting a project’s scope in the name of innovation is often not an option, which makes room for diving into more granular strategies for failure.

Leveraging the Failure Principle

Long-time innovation management scholar, Bengt-Arne Vedin takes the discussion of failure strategy beyond its baselines of acceptance and lesson learning. Vedin advances the debate to the point where failure is not just planned for, but designed in to the development process. In a 2010 Innovation Management article, In Search of Failure, Vendin advises quick, frequent, and cost-effective failure before illustrating how designers tend to leverage failure in the design process.

Vedin’s evaluation of prototypes and brainstorms really resonates at Speck. Where everyone in the company contributes to brainstorm sessions, failure is embraced through an inherent openness to all sorts of ideas and sources of inspiration. Surely many ideas may be impractical or far out, but this freedom of thought facilitates the birth of novel ideas. Mock-ups and prototypes, the tropes of our “get real,” design process, accelerate progress and innovation by getting ideas off the page and into forms where they can be tested, evaluated and improved at earlier stages. Paradoxically, getting real early, and testing and failing sooner, accelerate the overall product design process and reduce costs.

In a 2009 interview with Honda, driver Danica Patrick shares a perspective about the IndyCar races sounding much like the innovation race:

“You’re driving your car and you feel frightened a little bit. We bump up against that feeling as much as we can to try to push that limit further, get comfortable there, and then push again. You’re constantly on the brink of crashing ’cause that’s the fastest.”

And there you have it. Happy Innovating!