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The Innovation Hall of Fame
By Sean Luechtefeld on 02/03/2010 @ 08:52 AM
The International Consumer Electronics Show, the world’s largest trade show highlighting innovations in technology, took place last month in Las Vegas. As JD Lasica notes in his January 10 blog post, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski gave a talk about broadband connectivity in which he likened innovation to baseball. His analogy is this: in baseball, batting .300 every year gets a player into the Hall of Fame, even though that means the player failed in 7 out of every 10 attempts. Likewise, innovation succeeds only when innovators are unafraid to fail.
Genachowski’s analogy got me to thinking – what if no one was afraid to fail? What are we doing that we would not be able to do if we were scared of failing? More importantly (and more frighteningly), what aren’t we doing because we are afraid to fail?
Of course, we’ll never know. Innovative ideas come and go. Some flourish while others fall by the wayside. I think we owe it to ourselves not to find out the hard way what we might be missing out on. Sometimes, the most far-fetched ideas are the ones that stick (think crazy little box with moving images we now know as television).
I recently finished compiling survey feedback from the October 2009 Innovation Summit held here in Washington, DC. The whole idea for the Summit was to be the unconventional convention, the space where innovators collaborated with one another to develop their already-wonderful ideas. This unconventional model presented a lot of challenges to innovation@cfed. How could we allow each innovator the time to speak for a short enough time that everyone gets a turn to present while still allowing for in-depth understandings of their innovation? How could participants give their outsiders’ perspective on a project idea while still promoting their own innovation? On a broader level, how were we to design a Summit with enough structure to be productive, but not with so much structure as to be inhibiting?
The short answer is that there is no answer. The innovation@cfed team had a number of great ideas, but we didn’t know if they would work until we tried them. One way we thought we could overcome some of the time crunches of the traditional conference format was to have innovators give an "elevator speech" in front of all participants, allowing them to give a very brief overview of their idea. Then, those participants wanting to learn more could do so at the Innovation Exchange, a not-so-traditional exhibit hall where participants could find innovators and discuss in detail ways to improve the innovation. At the end of the day, we got lucky – participants gave overwhelmingly positive feedback about their experiences and the general attitude is that the Summit design offered great opportunities for discussion about how to move the featured innovations forward. In the coming weeks, that feedback will be available publicly, so keep checking back here at http://innovation.cfed.org.
In short, none of the successes of the Innovation Summit would have possible if we had been afraid to fail. But that’s exactly the point – embracing the fact that failure is inevitable is a key component to the success of fresh, new ideas. Even when it seems daunting, remember that failing 7 out of 10 tries will still get you into the Innovation Hall of Fame.
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