In a recent blog post on the Innovate on Purpose blog, the author Jeffrey Philips borrows a famous quote from Winston Churchill and bends it towards the field of Innovation: “Innovation success is based on going from “failure” to “failure” without a loss of enthusiasm.” In a lot of companies he writes, the fear of failing inevitably creeps in. This is very true. Personally, I think this stems from the fact that people responsible for a project/idea more or less connect their career to the project. From experience with different innovation projects I would suggest to take a step back and let ideas roam through the company to evolve more. At Innovation Factory we like to see ideas as a seed.
Most often ideas need some attention and enrichments from others to grow to a more mature state before a good decision can be made whether an idea should be picked up to start a project. Hence the seed metaphor; a seed also needs some attention and enrichment (water) to grow. The nice thing about the upcoming social software tools (Enterprise2.0 software) is that they suit this approach very well. First of all with tools like idea management software it is very easy for employees, and possibly suppliers and clients as well, to contribute ideas. But the real difference stems from the fact that you can use the collective brainpower to enrich (or grow) these ideas. A third interesting aspect of these type of tools is the fact that ideas (and their enrichments) get stored online. So far my story about software tools, because as the name implies they are merely the tools to become more innovative; It’s all about the way you use these tools whether your company will be successful at innovating.
To come back to the failure aspect, another quote in this context is very apt. It is a quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, directed to his employees: “I hope you fail often and I hope you fail fast”. As I described before, Google is a very innovative company. What Schmidt implies with his statement is that he wants Google employees to try out a lot of new ideas. In his quote the company culture is pronounced that it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes or formulate an idea that won’t make it. It is part of the process to come to new successful products or services as long as you learn from the mistakes and failures. The more you fail, the more you learn; while the faster you fail, fewer costs are made to learn. This learning from failures and discovering rapidly whether an idea is worth an investment in time and money to develop further is very well supported by social tools like idea management software. Like stated before, all the failures (ideas that won’t make it now) are stored online. So others that come up with the same idea at a later stage won’t have to spend time and money to do research for that idea. While over time, the market might have changed or new technologies might have come available and an idea that was rejected before might be great to develop now.
Probably the most crucial aspect in the above described situation is creating a company culture where failure is not punished but stimulated. A CEO stating that exact message is a very important drive for a company to become more innovative.
Internal communities help people within an enterprise solve problems faster and more effectively. A vibrant community, which brings together people from across the organisation will also generate more innovation. 
This case describes a bottom up innovation initiative at a large Dutch insurance company. The case shows that bottom up innovation in large enterprises through the use of an internal community, results in lower costs and an improvement of the speed and quality of the first 2 stages of the Stage-gate process.
TNT Post gaat met behulp van de expertise van Innovation Factory uit Amsterdam voortaan al zijn medewerkers nog actiever betrekken bij de innovatieve ontwikkeling van zijn producten en diensten.
