Tiffany Pham, founder and CEO of Mogul, and author of “You Are a Mogul,” talks about how to break away from a linear career path and follow your passion.…Read More
Creating a Nonlinear Career by Pursuing Your Passion
learning from failure
To Create a Culture of Innovation, Learn to Celebrate Failure
To be more innovative, organizations need to adopt the practice of testing and experimenting with new ideas. Nate Fink of Microsoft Yammer explains why abolishing the fear of failure is essential to this process.…Read More
Leadership, Talent, and Culture: How to Win the Long Game in Innovation
Our most recent conference examined the intangible factors that can make or break a company’s innovation outcomes.…Read More
Reversing course: Competing technologies, mistakes, and renewal in flat panel displays
The study explores renewal in a novel but understudied context—an era of ferment with competing technological options. It focuses on IBM’s transition from market leadership in a failed path (plasma) to leadership in the emerging dominant technology (LCD) in the 1980s. Interviews and internal documents offer two primary factors explaining renewal at IBM.…Read More
Falling Flat: Failed Technologies and Investment Under Uncertainty
This study theorizes about the behavioral and knowledge creation implications of betting on the losing technology in a competing technology situation and focuses on three main outcomes. First, in a situation with competing technological options, firms that invest initially in the losing technology will be less successful subsequently in building new knowledge.…Read More
Paul Schoemaker Talks to the Wall Street Journal about Brilliant Mistakes
Inventors from Archimedes to Thomas Edison and Jonas Salk have made mistakes that caused their discoveries to develop in surprisingly helpful directions. Now the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School is trying to capture mistakes like this, with the idea that making mistakes on purpose is something that all of us…Read More
Paul Schoemaker Explains What Makes a Mistake “Brilliant”
There will never be a shortage of dumb mistakes. Fortune magazine once compiled a list of the “101 Dumbest Moments in Business” that included Merrill Lynch’s investment in subprime mortgages just before the market meltdown in 2008, Mattel’s recall of 20 million toys treated with lead paint in China and…Read More
Daniel Zweidler on the Benefits of Sharing Failures
See Knowledge@Wharton‘s article on Daniel Zweidler’s (Mack Center Senior Fellow) case for how pharmaceutical companies could benefit by sharing their failures as well as their successes, in order to make research and development more efficient and improve the pharmaceutical pipeline. Why Sharing Failures Can Speed Up Innovation When it comes to innovation, most…Read More