Posts Tagged As Failure Forums

Failure Forums: Lessons Learned From Failed Startup inSphere

Most startups will fail. Everyone in the startup community knows that failure is a more common occurrence than success. Silicon Valley has become so enamored by the “value of failure” that rumors suggest they are considering handing out merit badges for failed entrepreneurs.  Just how common is startup failure? Harvard researcher Shikhar Ghosh cites that 75% of VC funded startups fail to return a single dime to their investors. So why do we hear so little about failed startups in Minnesota? Are we too “Minnesota nice” to brag about our failures?

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Failure Forums: Complexity Theory and the Role of Failure in Driving New Business Models

Driving corporate innovation is far more complicated than most observers realize.  During my Innovation Development days I knew that successfully launching a new initiative was a long shot. but looking back I had greatly underestimated all of the forces at play, especially the internal politics.  As many organizations are mining “big data” to make better business decisions some companies are looking to mine their “innovation data” to better understand these internal and external forces that determine an initiative’s success or failure.

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Failure Forums: Learning from Best Buy Media Label – Redline Entertainment

Seven years ago my team had just shut down the first of our two concept stores that we were running for consumer electronics retailer Best Buy.  My team had spent the last two years operating these concept stores in an attempt to understand more about the opportunities in “small box” retail.  During that time we had learned a ton and as a leadership team we were adamant that we needed to share what we had learned with the rest of the company.

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Launching New Series of Failure Forums on Innovation Excellence

This article is the first in my new series of Failure Forums published in Innovation Excellence.  The series is focused on bringing the role of innovation failure to the forefront.  It will intentionally bypass the innovation success stories to focus on the lessons learned from failures.  It is never easy to disclose our professional failures but these brave innovation practitioners are doing exactly that so that others can learn from their experiences.  This is the story of Jeff Stratman, a corporate innovator, and his journey to launch a new corporate venture called Orgango.

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Build a Learning Organization: Embedding Failure Into the Culture

For the longest time business and military leaders wouldn’t dare utter the word failure in front of their organizations.  For many the credo was that failure wasn’t an option.  Times have certainly changed but many organizations are just scratching the surface in addressing the difficult issues surrounding failure.

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Innovation Excellence: Five Ways Organizations Lose When They Cover Up Innovation Failures

When executives are allowed to hide their innovation failures the entire organization suffers.  False expectations are set for the entire group of executives, innovation leaders see their careers scuttled, and every other employee fails to learn from the failure.  Without clear organizational expectations of documenting, sharing, and learning from our failures we will continue to see them covered up.  Left to our own devices we will naturally seek to avoid our failures and move into self-preservation mode.  In my work helping organizations to build strong innovation processes this is a common issue but it can be resolved.

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Moving Beyond Big Data, Why More Leaders Should Focus on Their “Dark Data”

Big Data has been all the rage for the last couple of years as companies try to figure out how to mine all of the bits and bytes that are captured and stored from their business processes.

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