Learning thanks to Innovation Failure

Scholars, political and managerial discourses focus on successes and relegate failure as a problem or of no interest. The chapter looks at these dominant thoughts on innovation but also to literature opening a new way to think about failure. It first gives account of the prevalent views of innovation as a search for success and the few considerations regarding failure and the absence of conceptualization of failure dynamics and outcomes. Then, it documents a case study of failure through which it proposes an alternative way to think about innovation. In the third part, it develops an alternative view on failure using the lens of the learning processes and examines innovation failure as interesting processes, which generate resources and could be modelled to improve the performance of the failure. It highlights the relevance to integrate these questions into the innovation models and the necessity to improve our understanding of what is going on with this component of the innovation. The chapter offers a critique of current representations of innovation as success and some roads for a way of thinking about failure, its diversity (disaster, minor failure, near-failure, not expected results), its dynamics and its interest regarding political, social and managerial issues. It also suggests that success would need also more scrutiny to be usefull for innovation dynamics