The April 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review is all about failure. This issue is almost 10 years old, but it’s as relevant today as then. Early in the process of creating the Museum of Failure this issue became our bible. The issue is introduced with the following powerful words:

Failure. We’re hypocrites about it. Go online, and you’ll find scores of pleasant aphorisms celebrating the inevitability of failure and the importance of learning from it. But in real life—and in real companies—failure is anathema. We’re afraid of it. We avoid it. We penalize it. Failure is inevitable and often out of our control. But we can choose to understand it, to learn from it, and to recover from it.

Articles include:
Strategies for Learning from Failure by our favorite failure superstar professor Amy Edmondson.

Failing by Design argues that uncertain environments call for experimentation. Innovation, especially radical disruptive innovation is always uncertain and should be based on experimentation. The article describes how to set up experiments and more importantly how learn from the failures.

Why Most Product Launches Fail – offers some excellent advice on how to avoid a failed product launch. Many new product launches fail and the authors looked into more than 70 product launches for the years 2002 through 2008 to identify the most common reasons they fail.

1. The biggest problem is that companies focus more on designing and manufacturing the new product than the less fun work of marketing them. 

2. Inability to support fast growth is a costly failure if the product takes off.

3. Launching products prematurely. The Museum of failure is full of products that would likely have been successful if the launch was delayed until the product actually worked as promised. Microsoft Windows Vista, Apple Newton are two classic examples. 

4. The new item exists in “product limbo.” This means that the product or service just isn’t distinct enough to persuade buyers. New products sometimes take on a life of their own within an organization, they get hyped internally and companies fail so appreciate that consumers don’t share their enthusiasm.

5. The product is so new and different that consumers just don’t get it. If consumers can’t quickly understand how to use your product, it’s doomed to fail. Febreze Scentstories by P&G is a great example of this. Was it a music player or was it an air-freshener or both?

6. Revolutionary that nobody needs. Or nobody wants to pay for. The Segway is the classic example.