"'Failure, and how companies deal with failure, is a very big part of innovation,' says Judy Estrin of Menlo Park, California. Failures caused by sloppiness or laziness are bad."
But failures resulting from trying a big, risky idea should be rewarded. As long as you learn something from the effort, it was not wasted. When you approach problems too conservatively, you don't have the breakthroughs that set you apart. You're doing the same tried and true things as everybody else.
Accept that having good ideas means having bad ones also.
"All innovative companies tend to be alike in certain ways, Ms. Estrin says. They encourage coworkers to trust each other, comment on each other's work and take criticism in stride. Also, managers encourage intelligent risk-taking, tolerate failure and insist that employees share information openly."
Some personal and environmental characteristics that foster creativity are:
- being last in the family, experiencing moderate family conflict and diverse role models
- being aggressive, egocentric or antisocial makes it easy to ponder ideas in solitude or challenge convention
- being competitive and unwilling to give up easily
- being able to take time off to let ideas incubate
- freedom to take risks and work on a variety of projects at once can spark flexible thinking
- while conflict and diversity trigger divergent thinking, war and anarchy are disruptive to new ideas
