Hack:
Encourage Failure (As a Means) to drive Innovation and Thought Leadership
October 1, 2010 at 4:20am
Summary
Taking the road less traveled requires experience not only of knowing the rewards of success but also understand the impact of failure. A leader's true innovative capabilities require organization's backing to explore new (mostly risky initiatives) ahead of the competition and hence an ecosystem which encourages individuals to think out of the box and be able to put shape to those ideas is key to creating highly evolving and innovative leadership.
Problem
Most organizations typically the ones carrying the weight of history tend to be risk averse and choose a follower model rather than being true innovators. The sparks of innovation are mostly driven through startups and entrepreneurs
who are able to sell their vision to investors who are ready to risk their investments for a exponential ROI.
who are able to sell their vision to investors who are ready to risk their investments for a exponential ROI.
There are so many who have given up their successful jobs in so called large established organizations in search of the road less traveled and have been successful in creating highly successful ventures. However not all of such initiatives make it TOP 10 list and a lot of them do fail.
Some of the questions which pop up are :
Why most organizations choose to leave the burden of risky innovation on smaller entities with much lower risk capacity and ability to bring in these ideas to daylight.
Do our organizations reward truly innovative ideas and create mechanisms to invest, so that the fruits of success and more importantly knowledge from failures can be gathered and create future waves of innovation.
Another question which we need to address is that are our organizations ready to address the challenge of innovation management and encouraging open and out of the box thinking at all levels and organization functions?
Solution
Solution to these problems may not be that simple considering that promoting even small changes in organizations ideology and culture have had sometimes disastrous results, however on the other side, the inability of organizations to continuously evolve and innovate is a guaranteed path towards a natural death.
Proposed ideas towards a solution:
"When challenging the conventional, TO FAIL IS OK", This will be the key idea which is needed to encourage free minds to take innovation seriously within the bounds of the traditional organization.
Make innovation a key theme and create a organization which challenges the Normal and Status Quo and develop leadership to manage the same.
Reward innovative ideas, both successful and the ones which provide feedback for future success (for better definition of the term failure).
Create a mechanism to capture learnings from success and failures of innovative ideas and use the same to develop effective and systemic approach to successful innovation.
Create forums with participation from innovation and thought leaders to ignite the young minds and mentor the budding thought leaders.
Practical Impact
Highly innovative organizations have created ecosystems which drive innovation and even Apple and Google of the world have had many many failed ideas which got invested into but never made it big.
What makes the difference though is that the successful ideas have generated multi billion dollar revenues and the failures have provided important feedback for the next generation of innovation.
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