International exhibition of failed products and services
The Museum of Failure[1] is a museum that features a collection of failed products and services. The touring exhibition provides visitors with a learning experience about the critical role of failure in innovation. According to its founder, Samuel West, the goal of the museum is to help people recognize the "need to accept failure if we want progress", and to encourage companies to learn more from their failures without resorting to "cliches".[2]
West's 2016 visit to the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb inspired the concept of the museum.[3] Museum founder and curator Samuel West reportedly registered a domain name for the museum and later realized he had misspelled the word museum.[4] The Swedish Innovation Authority (Vinnova) partially funded the museum.[5]
The exhibition opened on 7 June 2017 in Helsingborg, Sweden.[4] The exhibit reopened at Dunkers Kulturhus on 2 June 2018, before closing in January 2019. A temporary exhibit opened in Los Angeles in December 2017.[6] The Los Angeles museum was on Hollywood Boulevard in the Hollywood & Highland Center.[7] The exhibit opened in January – March 2019 at Shanghai, No.1 Center (上海第一百货).[8] In December 2019, a smaller version opened in Paris, France at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie along with other interesting failure-related exhibitions for the "Festival of Failures" (Les Foirés festival des flops, des bides, des ratés et des inutiles).[9]
The museum's package of Colgate lasagna is a replica since the company refused to send a real package of the short-lived 1960s product.[14][15] In May 2020, the museum made most of the collection of artifacts available for viewing on its website.
1 2 "About". Museumoffailure.se. Archived from the original on 3 May 2017. Retrieved 3 May 2017.
↑ Drollette Jr., Dan (16 January 2023). "Interview with Samuel West, founder of the Museum of Failure". thebulletin.org. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Archived from the original on 16 January 2023. Retrieved 16 January 2023. No, not at all. The whole aim of the museum is to help people recognize that we need to accept failure if we want progress. And by that I mean any kind of progress, not just consumer products and new devices. The main point is that we have to accept failure, because it usually takes several iterations before we get things right—most experiments fail. And then the second point—which I try to make money off of, with varying degrees of success—is to emphasize that companies in particular have to be better at learning from their failures. A corollary is that it is not cool just to "fail fast"—as they like to say in Silicon Valley. Or to "move fast and break things," or any of those clichés. Yes, it's okay to fail, but you have to learn something from the experience. Those are the goals of the museum, anyway.
Danner, J., & Coopersmith, M. (2015). The Other "F" Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work. John Wiley & Sons.
Cannon, M. D., & Edmondson, A. C. (2005). Failing to learn and learning to fail (intelligently): How great organizations put failure to work to innovate and improve. Long Range Planning, 38(3), 299–319.
Khanna, R., Guler, I., & Nerkar, A. (2016). Fail often, fail big, and fail fast? Learning from small failures and R&D performance in the pharmaceutical industry. Academy of Management Journal, 59(2), 436–459.
Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta‐analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113–165.
Agarwal, P., & Farndale, E. (2017). High‐performance work systems and creativity implementation: the role of psychological capital and psychological safety. Human Resource Management Journal.
West, S., & Shiu, E. C. C. (2014). Play as a facilitator of organizational creativity. Creativity research: An inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary research handbook (2014), 191–206.
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