Building an innovation lab - yes! Our first big fail!

I have the good fortune to be tasked with setting up an Innovation Lab within my company. Following a couple of rounds of brainstorming and chats within people within the business, I decided it was time to start doing something concrete. To this end, I launched an internal platform for gathering ideas (IdeaScale). My aim here was 1) to DO something 2) to replace the idea inbox which noone had used for over a year and 3) to get the organisation excited about doing creative work. In parallel, we launched a public side aimed at co-creation also using IdeaScale.

The launch got some good reactions and raised a few questions. Pretty much what I had hoped it would do.

A couple of days later, I was giving a presentation about ideas, innovation and culture when I got some very specific feedback that there was not enough buy-in and support from senior management and specifically the CEO. This was from my boss, who is also in the senior management team and had encouraged me to do things differently. Needless to say I was dissapointed. It was a blow and it knocked the wind out of my sails.

Afterwards as I was dwelling on this failure, I realised that it could not have been better. A main part of my presentation and something I see as key to innovation is an organisations ability to fail quickly and to keep on failing until it works. I was my own best example.

I had failed. Big time. Crashed and burned. Now was the time to learn from this and to do thinks differently, and hopefully better, going forward.

The one snag is, failing is not a experience. It took me a day or two to dust myself off. Watching a clothing ad helped.

Time to head off and fail again.