In a recent article in Research World *entitled, 'The glorious paradox of success if you need failure to achieve it,' by John Kearon, Chief Juicer - founder and CEO of BrainJuicer, Inc. he spends time discussing the importance of failure when it comes to innovation and how our current system of management does not allow us to fully fail before we can succeed. Failure. That seven letter word is dreaded by everyone. But those who strive call themselves inventors or creators know that an idea is not perfect on the first try, yet comes after many times of facing failure.
Since we don't allow the natural progression of things, we ignore natural progression such as trial and error or survival of the fittest. So how are we supposed to get to that final version of our innovative process without failing times before?
John Kearon points out that our culture is naturally against innovation. Instead of stumbling upon business failures, we instead turn to acquisitions and consolidations, not allowing innovation to take its proper course. Companies completely skip over the trial and error process. Our challenge is to learn how to speed up the mistake process. Therefore it is essential that we take more risks and learn from them in a smaller amount of time.
* this is a .pdf file that will download if you click on it; you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open it.