The Key to Innovation is Failure

“Fail Cheap, Fail Often”

In today’s exponentially competitive environment the key for a company’s survival is innovation. It doesn’t have to be the ground breaking innovation like the big tech companies strive for everyday. It’s the small daily innovations that cause that “aha” moment in each of us.

Innovation comes from creating friction within your organization. Not the kind of friction that leads to the Alpha Males in the room to jump up and down and bang their fists against the desk. It’s the kind of friction that comes from bringing people from different departments together to solve a pressing problem. It’s the kind of friction that comes from realizing that your organization is making the same mistake over and over again and partnering with a vendor to help stop the insanity.

With these types of innovation you are trying to do something that you as a company or even your industry hasn’t done before (if someone has it’s not innovation). For a new innovation there are no best practices. The best model is rapid trial and error. Similar to agile development, a company must rapidly prototype, test, fail, change, repeat.

“Fail Cheap, Fail Often”

The irony is that innovation requires multiple failures before you find the right solution. This flies in the face of Corporate America. New Media tools provide a perfect platform for this type of innovation. It has the ability to bring together a diverse group of people that may be geographically dispersed and because New Media tools are digital this allows for them to fail cheap.

Remember life before digital cameras? Remember how each picture had to be painstakingly agonized over, because it was permanent and expensive. Now with digital cameras you snap 4 or 5 pictures to see if one of them turned out. Online collaboration allows people to work out processes get lots of feedback and launch them on a small scale (think beta release). If it works go for a larger release and tweak it as you go.