Museum of Failure
The Museum of Failure[1] is a collection of failed products and services. The touring exhibition showcases failures to provide visitors a learning experience about the important role of failure for innovation and to encourage organizations to become better at learning from failure. The exhibition first opened on June 7, 2017 in Helsingborg, Sweden.[2] The exhibit reopened at Dunkers Kulturhus on June 2, 2018 before closing in January 2019. A temporary exhibit opened in Los Angeles in December 2017.[3] The Los Angeles museum is on Hollywood Blvd. in the Hollywood & Highland Center.[4] The exhibit opened January - March 2019 at Shanghai, No.1 Center (上海第一百货). [5] And in December 2019 a smaller version opened in Paris, France at the La Cité des sciences et de l’industrie along with other interesting failure-related exhibitions for the "Festival of Failures" (Les Foirés festival des flops, des bides, des ratés et des inutiles,)[6]
The growing collection consists of over seventy failed products and services from around the world. Every item provides insight into the risky business of innovation. Some examples of the items on display: Apple Newton, Bic for Her, Google Glass, N-Gage, lobotomy instruments, Harley-Davidson Cologne, Kodak DC-40, Sony Betamax, Lego Fiber Optics, the My Friend Cayla talking doll[7] and Paolo Macchiarini's infamous plastic trachea.
In May 2020 the museum made most of the collection of artifacts available for viewing on their website. As Covid-19 virus restrictions closed most museums around the globe many have offered free virtual tours[8]
The museum has received international attention for its unusual collection.[9][10][11][12]
The concept of the museum was inspired by Samuel West's 2016 visit to Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia.[13] Museum founder and curator Samuel West reportedly registered a domain name for the museum, and later realized he had misspelled the word "museum".[2]
The museum was partially funded by the Swedish Innovation Authority (Vinnova).[14]
References
- "About". Museumoffailure.se. Retrieved 2017-05-03.
- "Sweden's Museum of Failure highlights products that flopped". Washington Post. June 12, 2017. Retrieved June 13, 2017.
- http://failuremuseum.com/event/ad-architecture-design-museum/A pop-up version of the museum is on an international tour.
- "The Museum of Failure Has a New Home at Hollywood & Highland". 2018-03-08. Retrieved 2018-03-13.
- Group, SEEC Media. "5 excellent fails at the newly opened Museum of Failure". www.timeoutshanghai.com. Retrieved 2020-05-06.
- "Des flops au top ! - Les foirés - Événements passés - Ressources - Cité des sciences et de l'industrie". www.cite-sciences.fr (in French). Retrieved 2020-05-06.
- Lidz, Franz. "The Museum of Failure Showcases the Beauty of the Epic Fail". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 27 March 2020.
- Farago, Jason (2020-04-23). "Now Virtual and in Video, Museum Websites Shake Off the Dust". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-05-06.
- "The Museum of Failure in Sweden argues that real innovation requires failure — Quartz". Qz.com. 2017-04-13. Retrieved 2017-05-03.
- Vonberg, Judith (2017-04-06). "Museum showcases innovation failures". Edition.cnn.com. CNN. Retrieved 2017-05-03.
- "The Museum of Failure showcases — and celebrates — really terrible ideas - Home | As It Happens | CBC Radio". Cbc.ca. 2017-04-06. Retrieved 2017-05-03.
- "Sweden to open 'Museum of Failure' showcasing flop products". Thelocal.se. 2017-04-05. Retrieved 2017-05-03.
- "Största flopparna: Segway, cashkort och plastcykel | SvD". Svd.se. Retrieved 2017-05-03.
- "Museum of Failure". Vinnova.se. 2017-02-27. Retrieved 2017-05-03.
Further reading
- Danner, J., & Coopersmith, M. (2015). The Other "F" Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work. John Wiley & Sons.
- Cannon, M. D., & Edmondson, A. C. (2005). Failing to learn and learning to fail (intelligently): How great organizations put failure to work to innovate and improve. Long Range Planning, 38(3), 299–319.
- Khanna, R., Guler, I., & Nerkar, A. (2016). Fail often, fail big, and fail fast? Learning from small failures and R&D performance in the pharmaceutical industry. Academy of Management Journal, 59(2), 436–459.
- What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team, New York Times, 28 February 2016.
- Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta‐analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113–165.
- Agarwal, P., & Farndale, E. (2017). High‐performance work systems and creativity implementation: the role of psychological capital and psychological safety. Human Resource Management Journal.
- West, S., & Shiu, E. C. C. (2014). Play as a facilitator of organizational creativity. Creativity research: An inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary research handbook (2014), 191–206.