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Innovation & Failure

The Austrian Federal Economic Chamber invited me to speak at the bi-annual MIT Europe Conference in Vienna about ‘Innovation & Failure: The Basis for Building the Future’. This was a nice occasion to build a story around my research with Sören Petersen (formerly with the Technical University in Berlin, now with Google in Dublin).

In short: In the presentation I highlight that future challenges innovative solutions. Although innovation activities have the potential for failure, failure is a great opportunity for learning. To some degree – up to a certain point – innovation performance improves with increasing failure rates. The negative side effect of failure, however, is that it causes negative emotions and those might hamper the learning effect. Organizations can only learn from failures when they are able to handle those negative emotions.

Here is a video of the full presentation.