Wall Street Journal
by Sue Shellenbarger
27 Sep 11
….Amid worries that we are becoming less innovative, some companies are rewarding employees for their mistakes or questionable risks. The tactic is rooted in research showing that innovations are often accompanied by a high rate of failure.
"Failure, and how companies deal with failure, is a very big part of innovation," says Judy Estrin of Menlo Park, Calif., a founder of seven high-tech companies and author of a book on innovation. Failures caused by sloppiness or laziness are bad. But "if employees try something that was worth trying and fail, and if they are open about it, and if they learn from that failure, that is a good thing."
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Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis [says,] "The most successful people tend to be those with the most failures."
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[One supportive boss] describes the fallout [from innovation] as "paying tuition. As opposed to saying, 'You screwed up,' or, 'You messed up,' we say, 'Let's talk about what we learned.' That drives a lot of innovation," he says.
Employers use a variety of tactics to foster innovation. Grey New York blocks off a "no meeting zone" every Thursday morning, to allow employees sustained time for work on creative projects. Procter & Gamble Co. has set up a division for innovation, called FutureWorks.
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However, all innovative companies tend to be alike in certain ways, Ms. Estrin says. They encourage coworkers to trust each other, comment on each other's work and take criticism in stride. Also, managers encourage intelligent risk-taking, tolerate failure and insist that employees share information openly…..
http://online.wsj.com/article/work_and_family.html
