查看文章

Management research in general and innovation research in particular are obsessed with success. Learning from success stories or cases is at the core of most research projects and almost all of our teaching. Entrepreneurs, leaders of established organizations, government policymakers, foundation boards and others also focus almost exclusively on achieving success by building on success. Yet we all know from experience what a good teacher failure can be. As children we often want more than we are given or can easily achieve. We must explore, experiment and test what works; it is inevitable that we learn most from what does not work so that we can try again.

Failure is of course recognized in practice and research, but among grownups it is typically seen as a necessary but uninteresting precursor to what really matters: successfully bringing something new to market. The prescriptive advice to would be innovators is to tolerate failure:‘do not give up, get up and try again.’Policy makers, award givers, and society are urged not to stigmatize the loser because big winners often fail first.