How to mitigate failure in innovation
How can you mitigate the risk of innovation failure? This was one of the questions fellow Kogan Page author Nick Liddell and myself were asked during a recent webinar:
“Is there anything in common about companies that have innovated
successfully in the past? And are there any warning signs for where innovation is not likely to be successful?”
In this short clip we discuss the 70-20-10 rule of innovation, how to create a culture for creativity, IBM’s ‘wild ducks’ and fixed and growth mindset all topics covered in both of our books.
I talked about learning from prototyping and testing. “Resilience comes from us learning from what’s gone wrong, and also what went right. Google publish a quarterly failure report which you can see online and it’s their way of saying – okay look this is what went wrong and then sharing them so anyone else might learn from it rather than sweeping it under the carpet and pretending it didn’t happen.”
Nick talked about the benefits of allowing employees time to innovate and encourage wild ideas wherever they may come from in the organisation, citing 3M and Google as examples of where time allocated for ideation and sharing mistakes led to the creation of the ubiquitous Post-It, beloved of all brainstormers!
If you’d like to find out more about how to mitigate failure in innovation, you can download the first chapter of both our books free here.
