Innovation is key to the economic performance of firms. However, several types of risks and uncertainties often lead to high failure rates in innovation projects, to the extent that failure is now considered a typical step in an innovation process. If innovation failure was provoking stress in the past, the current socio-economic contexts makes if it something to regularly deal with and learning from. However, there still is a dilemma on whether innovation failure should be considered as an opportunity or a trauma for the firm. Exploring the three steps of an innovation failure, that is identifying, analyzing and experimenting, the present research offers new insights on the nature of innovation failure at an individual and team levels. In particular, via an inductive approach this study provides fours key approaches to understanding innovation failure. First, we have uncovered a wide range of approaches to organizational management and ‘Spaghetti’ organizational models of innovation that perceive failure as an opportunity for the innovation process. Secondly, our study identified what seems to be a widespread perception of innovation failure as a trauma, which encourages the culture of openness to failure and to share knowledge of failing innovations. Such views apply not only at organizational but also at individual and team levels. Third, our results serve to encourage individuals, teams and organizations to find new ways to learn from failures in innovation projects, and to have a less centralized management and control over innovation. Fourth, in our perception of the domain, failure could become the ‘new normal’ and a mean to generate new knowledge. This stimulates new directions in the decision-making process, towards novel pathways to innovation.

创新是企业经济绩效的关键。然而，多种类型的风险和不确定性往往会导致创新项目的高失败率，以至于失败现在被认为是创新过程中的典型步骤。如果说创新失败在过去会引发压力，那么当前的社会经济环境则让它成为值得定期处理和学习的事情。然而，对于企业而言，创新失败究竟是机遇还是创伤，仍然存在一个两难的选择。本研究探索了创新失败的三个步骤，即识别、分析和实验，为个人和团队层面的创新失败的本质提供了新的见解。特别是，通过归纳方法，本研究提供了理解创新失败的四种关键方法。首先，我们发现了多种组织管理方法和创新的“意大利面条”组织模型，它们将失败视为创新过程的机会。其次，我们的研究发现，人们普遍认为创新失败是一种创伤，这鼓励了对失败持开放态度的文化，并分享失败创新的知识。这些观点不仅适用于组织层面，也适用于个人和团队层面。第三，我们的结果有助于鼓励个人、团队和组织找到新的方法，从创新项目的失败中学习，并减少对创新的集中管理和控制。第四，在我们对该领域的看法中，失败可能成为“新常态”和产生新知识的手段。这激发了决策过程的新方向，走向创新的新途径。