How innovation in teams actually works

Fostering innovation requires a culture where failure istolerated, right?  Well, maybe not.

Research by LIW and the London School of Economicshas showed that there is no link between tolerance of failure and innovation.What teams do require is senior leadership support and a culture of learning.

This rings true: we find companies strugglingto accept failure when in fact they want to succeed. Also, ‘failure’ inbuilding software can be quite different from failure in developing drugs orbuilding bridges.

Whatdoes this mean for leadership?

Teamsneed to ‘learn fast’, not ‘fail fast’: they should use experiments to learnquickly and constantly improve in the eyes of their customers.

By theway, this article was iterated by a small team three times.  That wasn’tfailure on my part, it was learning.