Can failure be an effective strategy for innovation? It all depends on whether you perceive it as positive or negative, and what you learn during the process.
 
I’ve used examples from the MBAconnect.net social network that I run (for MBA alumni and current students from all business schools worldwide). However, all these lessons apply not only to social networks but also to other industries, products and services.
 
If you run a social network, you need to constantly enhance your website in order to stay current and relevant to your community, so you’re constantly watching market trends and trying new things. On MBAconnect.net, we try to listen to common suggestions from our community, and we ask a core group of our MBAs what they think of an idea for a new feature or an improvement on an existing one. If this market research is positive and the benefit outweighs the cost, then we build the first iteration and launch it. And our members will tell us if they like it or not, and if not, what we can do to improve it.
 
Sometimes the market research gives false positives or false negatives, so instead you have to rely on your gut to guide you. But you make the best business decision based on the information that you have at the time. This makes it a lot easier to accept the outcome, whether it works or not. If it works, that's great. If it doesn't, that's part of the learning. And often, gems emerge in the failure process that give you greater understanding of your market and how you can serve them better. So failure is a very necessary element of the learning and experience curve. After all, how do you recognise success if you haven’t experienced failure?
 
Like Guy Kawasaki says, "Ship, then test". You can test ad nauseam, but the best way to know if your new feature or improvement on a current one is ready to be launched, is simply to launch it and let the market tell you. If you over-test before launching, you might be perfecting unnecessarily or adding features (both at extra cost) that the market doesn't want. Also, as they always said during my MBA, “Analysis is paralysis”. This means that excessive testing can create a cycle of more testing and more analysis, and less action.
 
So in summary, just get your product or service out there and iterate. Or as Nike says “Just do it”. And learn from the outcome, be it positive or negative.