This spirit of American innovation has obviously been challenged during recent years in many market segments, such as automotive, textiles and electronics, but this spirit is still alive and well.

While attending a recent business symposium on innovation, I was struck by a simple statement by one of the speakers. When summing up a presentation on global competition, he said: “The competition never sleeps; it is always 6 a.m. somewhere in the world.” 

With this simple statement, he encapsulated why innovation is the most important competitive advantage for every organization in today’s world that has been made flat by broadband communications. Innovation no longer respects or even recognizes limits of time, geography or culture.   

The best ideas will attract development capital whether entrepreneurs are located in India, China, Europe or the United States. Our global competitors are hungry for the prosperity and the opportunities that can come with innovation. This insight should be humbling, challenging and invigorating for all of us.     

With so much media attention directed to the recent successes of global competitors, it is easy to overlook the incredible spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation that has made the U.S. economy the envy and the model for the world.    

This spirit of American innovation has obviously been challenged during recent years in many market segments, such as automotive, textiles and electronics, but this spirit is still alive and well.    

The challenge facing all companies in a global economy is to take a candid look at their corporate cultures, identify barriers to innovation and implement corrective and sometimes courageous action to shift the culture toward creativity. Many of the barriers to innovation may seem very small in concept, but huge in impact. One example is the concept of failure as viewed by much of corporate America today.   

At The Innovation Institute, we strongly believe that any organization striving for greater creativity in today’s global marketplace should consider removing the word “failure” from the innovation vocabulary - or at least change the definition.    

The difficulty in making this change, however, is the fact that the concept of failure is deeply rooted in every one of us. This fundamental emotional and psychological orientation helps explain why the fear of failure is the root cause for organizations that become mired in the status quo.

Learning Failure
Failure, with all of its negative connotations, is ingrained starting in childhood. A parent expresses disappointment in a child’s performance in sports. A teacher assigns a failing grade. As we get older, we learn to internalize failure. Many people are plagued with negative thought processes: “my career has not progressed as I would have liked because I made bad choices,” or “I am not spending enough time with my children and that makes me a bad parent.”    

The work world provides perhaps the most frequent encounters with a self-defeating concept of failure, further engendering fear and stifling innovation.  One is likely to hear:    

“We didn’t win the new account be­cause we didn’t work hard enough. The new product introduction did not meet projections because we were late to market. What we thought would be a process enhancement has actually re­duced productivity because the training was not effective.”   

From all of these directions – our personal lives, self images and careers – we develop an abhorrence of failure, and rightly so. Everyone naturally wants to be successful; making better-informed, wiser decisions obviously results in more positive outcomes.

A New Mindset
The fundamental challenge surrounding the negative perception of failure, however, is that this type of mindset can squelch innovation. Many individuals and organizations perceive creativity as fraught with the risk of failure. Avoid creativity and innovation and you reduce your risk of failure. We can easily see the Catch-22 in this kind of thinking, but it is more prevalent in corporate America than most of us would like.   

At The Innovation Institute, we do not remove “failure” from the creative vocabulary; we attempt to shift the deinition. One of our most intriguing institute sessions is entitled “Risk the Value of Failure.” As the title indicates, we believe there is great value in failure, at least as our group defines it.     

If an organization is in innovation mode, that automatically implies experimentation. It is demoralizing and counterproductive to believe you will achieve your ultimate goal on the first attempt or with the first idea. It may be the 99th attempt or the 100th idea that reaches your goal.    

Every interim step can provide an opportunity to generate the information and the insights needed to keep the pro­cess energized. Interim steps, if viewed carefully, may actually be an unexpected breakthrough.   

A number of pharmaceutical companies have discovered during clinical trials that a new drug designed for one malady actually offers side effects that make it more effective for a different ailment. Nearly everyone is familiar with the story of 3M and how a type of glue thought to be defective gave rise to the Post-It note.    

There is actually physiological evidence that taking a different view can result in new insights. The retina of the human eye contains two types of photoreceptors, rods and cones. The rods are more numerous – 120 million – and are more sensitive than the cones. However, they are not sensitive to color. The 6 to 7 million cones provide the eye’s color sensitivity.   

Because there are two different elements in sight, we can gain an entirely different perspective on a subject by changing our angle of view.    

For example, seasoned boaters know that a buoy that is invisible at night when viewed straight on can actually be seen when viewed from a peripheral perspective. Change your perspective and you change the result.    

During programs at The Innovation Institute, we use this knowledge of the eye’s composition to demonstrate models for viewing works-in-progress so that individuals and organizations are encouraged to gain from incremental experiences and different perspectives so they, can discover unexpected breakthroughs, as well.

‘Looking Sideways’
The point we want to communicate is that what appears to be a failure could actually be a resounding success if you are able and willing to change the way you view the situation. There are easy-to-apply techniques for approaching challenges from new perspectives so that you don’t view each progressive step as a failure. Taking a clue from the boating example, we call it “looking sideways.”    

There are many steps along the pathway of nurturing an innovative corporate culture that is capable of competing globally. One of the most important and most fundamental of these is to defuse the word failure.    

Take away its sting and its stigma and you remove the power of failure to stifle innovation. Individuals and organizations who can make this shift in perception have taken a giant leap forward in fostering a culture in which creative ideas flow freely, no longer encumbered by long-held notions that are ultimately self-limiting.

Barbara Spradling is director of The Innovation Institute at McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, N.C. The Innovation Institute encourages innovative cultures by providing executives with insights into the artistic
creative process and how it can be applied within their careers and their organizations. For more information, visit innovationatmccoll.org, or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .