In order to succeed you have to fail… a lot. This means you have to experiment and measure and evaluate and iterate on what you are doing. This means you will get better and better as you learn more and more what not to do, in order to learn what to do. It also means you need good leadership.

 It is surprising how many large companies do not have the stomach for this. They have the money to spend, they can absorb the risk, they can afford to fail yet they refuse to experiment, they squash innovation.

 I have seen things like contests/code-a-thons to come up with new ideas, with the selected winner chosen to try out but never tried out. I have seen innovative business/product ideas killed because “it just doesn’t fit with our model’.

 There is nothing more disheartening than having your ideas crushed beneath the heels of “that is not the way we do things around here” for no good reason, for fear of failure. There is nothing more heartening and supportive of innovation than saying “try it, measure it and we will see how it works out.”.

 I personally have put my job at risk to protect teams that were innovating, experimenting and trying to forward the corporate strategy and success and have even lost a job doing so. If your company is not innovating then you have the wrong people in charge of it, it is leadership and management that creates the environment for innovation, they are the sunlight, or they are the darkness and nothing much grows in darkness.