Dr. Samuel West: Museum of Failure

Dr. Samuel West is a licensed clinical psychologist and specialist on organisational psychology, who is also the creator and curator of the Museum of Failure, a travelling collection of products that have failed in the conventional sense, but represent something far more important, which is the willingness to fail.

Anyone working in corporate innovation, corporate venture capital, or in any field of innovation will know that the fear of failure, the unwillingness to fail, effectively means the death of innovation. Without the appetite for risk, without the understanding that not every initiative will be successful, you’re left with an incredibly narrow path to creating anything new.

So what lessons can we draw from our own failures and those of others? Dr. West talks about the differences between good and bad failures, how organisations are not that different from individuals in terms of how they view and deal with failures, the importance of creating a psychologically safe environment where failure is not punished, and how he went about putting this impressive collection of corporate relics together.


“Funky Chunk” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

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