Why learning from failure isn’t easy (and what to do about it): Innovation trauma at Sun Microsystems

Abstract

Popular parlance suggests that ‘you learn more from your failures than from your successes’. However, when it comes to failed innovations in organizations, we find that the proverb is not always true. We suggest that instead, failure may often lead to innovation trauma, an inability to commit to new innovations due to severe disappointment from previous innovation failures. We discuss innovation trauma in the context of Sun Ray, the thin-client computing innovation that came out of Sun Labs at Sun Microsystems. Sun Ray was too closely associated with an earlier, highly publicized failure called JavaStation, and never really got a chance to prove its mettle. We suggest overcoming innovation trauma is a critical but underappreciated aspect of innovation management in companies such as Sun Microsystems that depend on continuous innovation for their competitiveness. Thus the concept has significance beyond this particular case study in that it points to the role emotions play in innovation failure and to the need for managers to mediate such potentially traumatic experiences in order to sustain innovation after serious failures.