The Importance of Failed Innovation

Scott Anderson wrote a post today: The Importance of Failed Innovation. He writes,

(O)ne way out of this problem is to increase the innovation success rate. A noble aspiration for sure. But be careful. Following that seemingly sensible path can lead to some perverse behavior.

He's right about that: fear of failure can drive innovation towards the tyranny of incrementalism, where breakthrough ideas get filtered out before they have a chance to prove themselves.

He lists countermeasures like "Lower the cost of experiments," "Change the order of experiments" and "Increase the pace of decision-making."

Of course, a well-designed set-based process that evaluates multiple options to burn down risk accomplishes all three - while also increasing the likelihood of success.

I agree with Scott that innovation needs the freedom to generate lots of ideas that fail. But if you know what your strategic objectives are going in and you evaluate a set of ideas that will meet those objectives at the same time, your likelihood of achieving the results that you desire increase dramatically - which is what we all really care about.