This month’s CSIC Smart Infrastructure Blog by Hassan Butt, HS2 Graduate Innovation Analyst, and Andrew Pestana, HS2 Innovation Strategy Lead, reflects on learnings from the HS2 Innovation Engine Week (IEW) where discussion and thinking considered innovation, risk and what can be learned from failure.
At the event, attendees comprising HS2, its supply chain and partners were reminded of American businessman and former President of IBM, Thomas Watson’s statement that: “If you want to double your success, you need to double your failure.” The Smart Infrastructure Blog, titled ‘Living in an imperfect world – is it time to embrace failure?’, reflects on perceptions of failure: “Failure is often synonymous with a negative experience and something we are conditioned to avoid. A sense of dread and foreboding associated with failure can be so great at times that it is easy to give up on our dreams. Where does this insecurity come from, and is there a way to embrace failure and leverage this to our advantage as innovators?”
A sense of dread and foreboding associated with failure can be so great at times that it is easy to give up on our dreams. Where does this insecurity come from, and is there a way to embrace failure and leverage this to our advantage as innovators?” Smart Infrastructure Blog
The Blog considers individuals who have overcome multiple failures on their road to success, and the concept of failure in professional sport before placing the discussion of risk and failure in the context of infrastructure and construction: “In construction we have arguably created an unhelpful separation between failure and learning. Reclassification and acceptance of failure is an essential part of our journey towards innovation and by considering a more learning-based approach we need to move to a space of learning-based innovation.”
• Read the full Smart Infrastructure Blog ‘Living in an imperfect world – is it time to embrace failure?’ here
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