by Wes Sonnenreich, Innovation Director for Deloitte Australia

“These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time.” – Barack Obama, Sept 8th speech to America’s schoolchildren.

A great idea is just the start of a journey to realizing value.

How far that journey goes depends on effort, skill, timing and luck.

Many great ideas will “fail”.

Some fail because the effort wasn’t enough, often because of inadequate funding. Others fail because the team had the wrong skill set to develop the idea. Sometimes ideas are too far ahead of, or behind, their time. And finally everything else could be right but the idea team could just be unlucky.

In perspective: the best venture capital firms only see 30% of their investments in “new ideas” succeed.

These firms have worked hard to select only the best ideas that have the greatest chance of success. They mitigate risks of effort and skill by making sure the team is the right team and they are adequately funded. And still, 70% or more fail.

It’s not a failure if a valuable lesson is learned from the experience.

To be valuable, the lesson has to be new and relevant to future projects. For example, learning that an idea failed because of poor project management is a valuable lesson. It is no longer a valuable lesson the fifth time an idea fails for the same reason.

It’s often best if the idea fails early, as the cost of the lesson learned will still be low.

Fail early, fail cheaply, fail often, but fail valuably by learning something!