Innovation can be defined as a fundamental change in design or function, resulting in a new product or process. And failure is defined as a temporary setback or loss. But isn’t it true that it is often after a mistake or loss that we seek to make changes? And don’t these changes lead to new processes?
Innovation and failure go hand in hand. As humans, the act of trying to create something new and innovative is about more than just success; it can transform our entire outlook on life. However, the same can be said about failure, and yet we learn far more from our failures than from our successes. How does that happen? Let’s dive in!
The Value of Failure in Innovation
"Failure" is an ambiguous term that encompasses many different types of outcomes. What one person considers a failure may be another person's success. But even when we consider only those events that are objectively negative—such as a failed project—they can still lead to positive outcomes.
According to psychologist Karl Duncker, people who have experienced failure are more likely to come up with creative solutions than those who have never failed at all. This may seem counterintuitive at first, but it makes sense once we consider why people fail in the first place and what they learn from those failures.
For a business to innovate, it must be willing to take risks and learn from its mistakes. This can be difficult for people who have been conditioned by their education or upbringing to believe that mistakes are bad—something to be avoided at all costs. This is where the fear of failure comes into play.
Fear of failure and its emotional impact
Fear is a universal, instinctive, and functional emotion. It is functional because it helps alert us to danger and prepares our bodies to run, scream, fight, or freeze. There are two types of fear:
- Factual fear: The kind of fear we feel when something truly threatens our physical safety, such as an accident or a natural disaster, for example.
- Fictitious fear: The kind we feel when we fear failure, for example. Our brain conjures up hypothetical scenarios and jumps to conclusions. This is the brain’s way of “bracing” for the impact. Our daily lives are full of them.
If you live in a big city and all your basic needs are met, most of your fears are unfounded. If you live in a war zone, most of your fears are likely well-founded.
When it comes to overcoming the fear of failure, two other emotions play a critical role: shame and guilt. Let’s say we calculated the budget for a project and it turned out to be much more expensive than we had estimated.
- Shame tells us that we are incapable of making calculations.
- Guilt makes us feel that we caused a financial loss because we made a mistake.
- Shame tells us that we ARE bad people.
- Guilt tells us we DID something wrong.
- Guilt makes us want to fix what went wrong.
- Shame makes us want to hide our mistakes
By acknowledging all the emotions involved and the nature of the fear we’re experiencing, we can take appropriate action. But no amount of healthy coping mechanisms will change the fact that many organizations still don’t recognize failure as essential to creating innovative solutions. More often than not, the fear of failure can be better managed by exploring how failure drives different types of innovation.
Types of innovations that require failure
Within the framework of a failure culture, we recognize that change in innovative processes stems from four types of innovation: radical, disruptive, incremental, and sustaining. Each type of innovation requires something different: a paradigm shift (radical), a unique solution (disruptive), focus (incremental), and attention to detail (sustaining).
Let's briefly examine each type of innovation and how failure is critical for all of them:
- Incremental Innovation: Gradual, continuous improvements to existing products and services.
As previously mentioned, incremental innovations require attention to detail. This is because incremental innovations are versions of the same product or service that are just a little better than the previous one. By repeatedly failing at different tasks, goals, or processes, products and services are improved, and customers or end users feel that their needs are being identified and addressed.
- Disruptive Innovation: a new technology or business model disrupts the existing market. Think Netflix, Uber, Airbnb…
These types of innovations create a new value network and provide an opportunity to move up into a higher market segment and compete with established rivals. Disruptive innovations arise from identifying profitable opportunities in processes, business models, products, or services that are currently underperforming but may significant growth potential in the future.
- Sustaining Innovation: occurs within the current market and improves and expands existing value networks.
Sustaining innovation targets more demanding, high-end customers by offering better performance. Sometimes, disruptive innovations evolve into sustaining ones that may appear to be failing but actually aren’t. Take the iPhone, for example. Even though Apple has failed to introduce truly innovative features, its profits continue to grow.
- Radical Innovation: revolutionizes technology and creates a new business model.
This type of innovation is rare. It leads to the emergence of a new kind of system or product with unique qualities and features that are distinctly different from any product or process that has come before it. The personal computer and the Internet are prime examples of radical innovation. How many iterations—failures—do you think there have been in the history of the PC and the Internet?
The Role of Leadership in Failure-Based Innovations
Innovation is clearly a broad process that brings together different perspectives, conversations, and influences. Great creative ideas emerge in environments where people feel safe to explore, discuss, and share. As you can imagine, this is only possible in environments that foster psychological safety, vulnerability, and trust—where people feel comfortable sharing all kinds of wild ideas, challenges, and even mistakes.
Innovation takes patience. And it’s not just about one person; it requires a diverse team with the right mindset and the right kind of leadership. It’s much easier to try, fail, and keep trying when you’re working together as a team with your manager. By encouraging risk-taking within clear boundaries and creating a safe space for difficult conversations conducted with vulnerability, managers and other leaders model the behaviors that foster innovation rather than burnout.
Creating a Culture of Failure for Innovation
To innovate, you need to follow a series of steps that mirror the scientific method you’re probably already familiar with: observation, hypothesis, experimentation, analysis, and conclusions. Don’t worry—for now, we’ll focus on the experimentation stage, since it’s closely tied to the importance of trying and failing.
The purpose of the experimentation phase is to realize as soon as possible that our hypothesis is wrong. If we fail to find a fatal flaw, the project can proceed with reasonable confidence.
A good example of the experimentation stage is Google's Loon project. The project involved a series of balloons in the stratosphere designed to address the problem of Internet access in underserved areas. The Google team conducted more than 2,100 test flights, focusing on finding solutions to potential problems.
Although Loon featured many technical advancements, its commercial viability was slow and somewhat risky, leading to its cancellation in 2021. Despite its failure, the data collected in the stratosphere helped fuel scientific studies of Earth's climate. The technologies developed also contributed to a new project at Google, and related patents are available to the public for use in similar projects.
Google's culture of taking risks in safe environments allowed the company to learn from the failure of Loon and launch more successful similar projects. Innovation requires creativity, time, and space, but also psychological safety and vulnerability.
An open and transparent environment where team members are willing to listen is essential for building resilient and meaningful relationships that provide the confidence needed to take risks, bounce back, and try again.
In conclusion
Success and failure are two sides of the same coin. Innovation is the result of both. However, people, cultures, and organizations typically reward success while punishing failure. People fail to innovate because they fear failure more than they value creativity.
Fear of failure can stifle creativity and productivity, leading to a culture where innovation fails to take root. To foster innovation within your organization, it is crucial to change your mindset about failure and create an environment where people are encouraged to innovate, even if they don’t succeed.
Successful innovators learn from their failures to increase the likelihood of future success. To foster an organizational culture that encourages innovation and does not view failure as a negative outcome, leaders must set an example of appropriate behavior throughout the organization.
Let's work together to help your team break free from its current cycle of failure. Check out our online innovation course, our innovation workshop , or fill out this form so we can collaborate and find innovative solutions.
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