Innovation is trying out without knowing the outcomes

You can learn from failures, but it takes courage and an open dialogue. On autopsy.io you can find a whole series of start-ups that have not made it, with a reason for that from the founders themselves. From practical, “did not scale fast enough”, hilarious “another casualty in the decline of Flash” to tragic and recognizable to many, “stuck with the wrong strategy for too long.” The causes of the failure of start-ups are diverse. They are not innovative enough, the money runs out, there is no good team, people are overtaken by the competition or the product or service simply was not good enough. Did those failed start-ups not know this beforehand? Sometimes, perhaps, but the crux of innovation is to try something new that does not know exactly what that will bring in advance.

Moreover, if you try to innovate or start a business in the present complex time, you already know in advance that the strategies you have in mind will rarely turn out as planned. Where companies were able to hold on to a pre-formulated strategy two decades ago, you see that we now have to continuously adjust, based on feedback from the market. And the factors on which we (have to) react have become so interwoven in their mutual relationship that the consequences turn out to be unpredictable or not fully understood. Since no one can see all the consequences – even the most advanced algorithm can not do that yet – it is the art to learn to navigate instead of controlling. Masz punkt na horyzoncie, ale jak się tam dostać, musisz być w stanie regulować to w sposób ciągły. Taka postawa wymaga elastyczności i odporności psychicznej.

Odpowiedz na (nieoczekiwany) rozwój poprzez bycie zwinnym

Liczy się to, że jako organizacja uczysz się zajmować taką pozycję, że możesz szybko i bez problemów reagować na różne wydarzenia. Oznacza to zobaczenie, co się dzieje i co to oznacza dla Ciebie jako organizacji i jednostki. I zdolność faktycznego przystosowania się do tych nowych spostrzeżeń. Paradoksalnie, trzeba być przygotowanym na to, że nie na wszystko można się przygotować. Co możesz zrobić, oczywiście, uczy się lepiej radzić sobie z nieoczekiwanym, uczenie się bycia czujnym na zmiany i nauczenie się, jak korzystać z tych zmian tam, gdzie to konieczne. By spreading your opportunities for example, or not sticking to your first solutions and ideas, but looking further.

Use your failures to improve

Fear is a bad counselor. Research shows that it is an important factor that factor that retains the ability to reflect on their behaviour and actions, to take distance and get a good overview or think in alternatives. Fear reduces your world, makes you cling to what you already know and know and it is therefore a blockade for innovation. The fear often consists of two parts. Po zarejestrowaniu się w naszych wspaniałych nieudanych aktualizacjach za pomocą poniższego formularza otrzymasz link do pobrania., there is the fear of trying something that can fail at all. And there is also the fear of talking about something that goes wrong or has gone wrong. But the question is whether failure is as terrible as we think. Myślę, że porażka nie jest testem umiejętności, który teraz jej przypisujemy, ale tylko próba z innym (negatywny) wynik niż planowano. I właśnie ta badawcza i przedsiębiorcza postawa jest tak ważna w nawigowaniu do tego punktu na horyzoncie. Więc strach przed porażką, główną blokadę dla innowacji, jest czymś, z czym musimy się zmierzyć. Jeśli spróbujemy czegoś nowego w złożonym świecie i to się nie powiedzie, to nie jest coś, za co powinniśmy się nawzajem obwiniać. Zamiast , powinniśmy wspólnie uczyć się na popełnionych błędach. Powinniśmy stworzyć klimat, w którym ludzie odważą się eksperymentować, uczyć się i dzielić. W którym poważnie traktują złożoność i są otwarci na pośrednie informacje zwrotne i informacje zwrotne (odpowiedź wybiegająca w przyszłość). Taki klimat staje się coraz ważniejszy, ponieważ przedsiębiorcy muszą być zwinni, a ich zdolność do samouczenia się jest kluczowym czynnikiem. Jeśli nie spojrzymy na sprawy inaczej, zmieniamy również boisko.

Dobrym, praktycznym przykładem start-upów, które nie bały się podzielić niepowodzeniem, jest HelloSpencer, usługa dostarczania na start. HelloSpencer chciał mieć możliwość dostarczenia dowolnego zamówienia z dostawą w ciągu 60 minuty. Więc: składasz zamówienie, za pośrednictwem strony lub aplikacji, a po potwierdzeniu Spencer wyrusza w drogę i możesz podążać za nim cyfrowo do swoich drzwi. Usługa dostawy nie dotarła. Założyciele ogłosili we wrześniu 2015 że nie mogli uzyskać modelu biznesowego dla swojej usługi typu „all-in-call”.. Po kilku kolejnych próbach, the entrepreneurs placed their most important failures and lessons happily on their website. What did not work: dream big, start small. By starting very small – with just a phone number for text delivery orders – HelloSpencer hopes to grow organically. By not focusing on the logistics process, but the personal experiences between deliverer and customer, they got a lot of insight into the buying motives of customers and the confirmation that they really had something good in their hands. Unfortunately, because of this, people lost themselves too much in the illusion of the day and a clear focus was chosen too late. Secondly: make sure you get the numbers. Making delivery services cost-effective is ultimately about volume. Although there were more customers every week, the growth phase took too long. HelloSpencer had either needed more volume or a longer term financing. Neither were the case now. The last lesson of HelloSpencer: keep everyone on board; putting together a team with sufficient talent and energy is step one. But ensuring that everyone can continue to develop themselves, as a team but also on a personal level, is at least as important to retain people.

Personal failures and learnings

My own start-up adventure involves an innovative sports product and game concept called YOU.FO; you throw and catch an aerodynamic ring with specially designed sticks (see www.you.fo). My ambition is that YOU.FO will be played worldwide as a new sport and leisure game. If I have learned something during this initiative in recent years, it is that you have to continuously adjust your strategy based on feedback from the market. We won several (inter)national awards and I assumed that YOU.FO together with distribution partners was put on the market top-down. In the end, the practice turned out to be much more unruly. For example, our first attempt to launch YOU.FO in the United States failed. I found partners in New York that I hired for a year for marketing and sales. That has not yielded enough. Because of the monthly fee, there was too little entrepreneurship to really go for YOU.FO through the fire. The lesson I learned is that from now on I will only select partners who want to invest in advance and also commit financially, for example by paying a license fee. This ensures motivated enterprising partners who, just when things are not going well, persist and seek new ways. Dodatkowo, I also learned that this innovative sport game requires much more bottom-up marketing effort; people have to experience it by doing and creating the learning curve that keeps them enthusiastic. Together with partners in Europe, India and the Middle East, I am now going to set up communities where local entrepreneurship is central. That is a completely different approach than I had in mind at the beginning. We are now active in 10 countries, but that is, until today, with trial and error. And, this sporty business adventure lasts many times longer than expected. In that respect I like the lessons of HelloSpencer, autopsy.io, The Institute for Brilliant Failures and others! They encourage to learn from previous failure without embarrassment. That sharing and learning from failures does not only have to be done afterwards. Especially when you are in the middle of a start-up process, it is relevant to reflect on your own assumptions and approach at set times. And, to share these reflections with others. All this under the guise: Sometimes You Earn, Sometimes You Learn. And sometimes that comes together fortunately.

Bas Ruyssenaars
Entrepreneur and cofounder of the Institute for Brilliant Failures

This is an edited version of a contribution published in the journal M & C (1/2016).