When is failure an option?

You’ve probably read books about innovation that convince you to learn to fail.

But is that what you want as a customer?

Let’s imagine that you’re going on your next vacation, and you’ve splashed out for a stay at the glorious Four Seasons hotel.

You’re looking forward to silky smooth sheets, impeccable service and massages to make your body forget that you’ve ever carried a back pack.

You arrive at the Four Seasons, and get told that their new booking system doesn’t have reservation. 

Yes, there is a room available, but it’s smaller than you had booked and hasn’t been cleaned. The cleaner is busy with other rooms, so you can check in, but cleaning won’t be done for another 5 hours.

You want a nap, but the thought of sleeping in used sheets isn’t appealing. 

How would you feel? What would you think?

I would be furious, feel robbed and let down. 

What if the Four Seasons staff told you that they were taking a new experimental approach to hotel management, and that failure was part of the process. 

Would that make you feel better?

I think not.

Failure is a vital part of disruptive innovation, but it is absolutely unacceptable in sustaining innovation. 

Sustaining innovation is the dedicated effort to make good products even better, and keep delighting your loyal customers. These customers are usually high end clients, who pay a lot and expect a lot in return.

When you book a suite at the Four Seasons, you have a very clear idea of what to expect, and the hotel group makes a huge effort to make sure you get it. 

Disruptive innovation is when you invent a new product for a new market. There are no established customers, and so there are no expectations. 

A new product is a hypothesis. You don’t know who will want it (or even if anyone will), or how they will use it. 

You only find what will work by finding lots of things that don’t.

In disruptive innovation, failure is the path to success. 

Disruptive innovation usually begins at the low end of the market: cheap products with low margins.

Continuing with the travel example, this is when Airbnb started helping people book a couch to stay on. Customers didn’t expect five star service, and booked again even when they didn’t have a perfect experience. 

Airbnb’s service was completely irrelevant to the people who book suites at the Four Seasons.

But this didn’t remain the case forever. 

I rented a gorgeous villa in Ibiza on Airbnb, and you can book a castle. 

Disruptive innovations eventually move up market. This is how they displace established players.

Clayton Christensen, who taught at Harvard Business School, studied this phenomenon and wrote about it in The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail 

For a summary of what corporates can do to thrive in the face of technological change, watch this video lesson I made:

4 Steps to innovation, Lessons from The Innovator's Dilemma, part 2

You will learn:

• Why corporate leaders choose to ignore new opportunities and what to do about it
• What is reasonable to expect of an innovation unit (and what isn't)
• When tolerating failure is appropriate and when it's unacceptable 

Watch here.

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To discuss how our trainings can help boost innovation and creativity at your organisation, book a consultation call here.

Happy clients include the Royal Bank of Canada, Oxford University and Constellation Brands.

Speak soon,

Sophia