This article was taken from the May 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Eric Ries, entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and creator of The Lean Startup, a methodology whereby iterations of a business are field-tested on customers, sometimes several times a day, says there's a compelling business case for valuing failure. "In the industrial world we have the problem of having more productive capacity than we know what to do with," he says. "That's at the root of the unemployment crisis: we've got so productive at making things, we don't require people to be involved in making the basics of life any more. Or nearly as many people."
Increasingly, the dominant question will be not can it be built? butshouldit be built? "Our future prosperity will depend on the quality of our collective imagination, which is a very strange place to be, historically speaking. Imagination is supposed to be something for the arts, for philosophers and the thinkers, not for the cold, hard reality of business and economics. We have to become more innovative as an industrial economy."
Yet grasping for the obviously good idea has its own pitfalls. "We have a real bias towards trying to understand things through the lens of what works today," Ries says. "Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as 'the X of Y', so this is going to be 'the Microsoft of food'. And yet disruptive innovations usually don't have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn't."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
