Lessons from the "Museum of Failures".
The Museum of Failures in Sweden is a collection of more than seventy innovative products that were complete failures. Innovation is risky and not without its failures. The museum is a unique and fun experience to learn about some of these mistakes of great companies and a lesson to learn from the mistakes of others.
With a brilliant idea, the Museum of Failures has been inaugurated in Sweden, a unique opportunity to prove that when it comes to innovation, not everything is a success. Behind the greatest successes and the most innovative products, there are countless failures, although many of them do not reach the market and are therefore unknown to the public. In spite of this, some of them are marketed and either because of a bad design, a bad marketing campaign or simply because they should never have existed because they have no market, they fail resoundingly.
This situation occurs not only in small companies but also in reputable multinationals that despite having enough experience and theoretically with the necessary mechanisms for this to happen fall into error. Having access to these products gives us the opportunity not only to focus on the successes but also to learn from the failures. It is not about stopping innovation, but about inspiring people and not being conditioned by failure. Error is part of innovation.
Obviously, in order to guarantee their survival, companies cannot make consecutive major mistakes in the marketing of their products. That is why it is essential to have an adequate, practical and agile methodology that minimizes this type of risk as much as possible. It is a matter of having tools that allow us to validate innovation projects in all phases of evolution, from idea generation to market launch, in order to be able to correct the project in time or cancel it if necessary.
For companies, establishing these mechanisms may not be an obvious thing to do since an excess of conservatism would lead the company to stop all its projects and an excessively lax evaluation can lead to errors. We must seek a balance and in any case fundamentally seek an agile development that allows us to validate our ideas with the market as soon as possible. This will allow us to introduce improvements, adjust the product or cancel it in early stages of the project, saving both economic investment and time of our team.
