Great post by Till Grusche of Frog Design, FailForward: Why Successful Innovators Have to Learn How to Fail explains us how to better think the innovation process.
While I full agree on teaching failure better and adopting the “design-as-a-process” from the early start, the "Google Wave" example highlights that a "corporate failure" may be a sign of good business management, but may have a dramatic impact on employees.
My opinion on Google Wave is that is was only "half a failure". Great idea, great concept, but beta-level prototype that suffered from bad ergonomy and bad visual design. They hadn't enough time to improve on it.
Many people believed in it (see the reactions after the termination announcement).
For me, it was killed *too early*, viewed as a failure according to "Google standards".
The problem is that it had a terrible impact on true inside innovators: Lars Rasmussen (Maps, Wave) left to go to Facebook, as did many. And this led recently to a general 10% salary increase at Google to stop the bleeding.
The price to pay for killing "cool" projects, I guess.
How good is this, in the end, in term of business and employee inspiration?
Clearly the Google Wave case demonstrated to many employees that Google wasn't the good place where they could innovate on high-risk projects anymore.
Finding the right moment to fail is a very delicate tradeoff...
Seems like the "Forward" in "FailForward" failed for them {;-))
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