Supporting innovation with a failure-learning oriented culture - an integrative model of the literature

As early as 1939, Schumpeter highlighted the driving role of innovation in the evolution of the natural business cycle and the emergence of clusters of technological innovations, driven by dynamic entrepreneurs ready to take risks and to learn from the mistakes and failures of their unlucky initiatives.
Therefore, the ability of the entrepreneur (and of the company that manages his or her activities) to implement a culture that is open to failure and that capitalizes on the learning from these failures without systematically making them a sanctioning element plays a key role in strengthening the company's innovation capacities. This failure-learning oriented culture (FLOC) must then be translated into practices and processes that are open to learning from mistakes and failures within the organization.
Scientific research has only very recently and still only partially addressed the development and implementation of such a culture, but already offers some elaborated frameworks.
The aim of this chapter is to summarize three recent contributions closely related to the development of a failure-learning oriented culture and to propose an integrative model, partially tested, which aims to reflect the dynamics of the levers and mechanisms that can support a culture open to learning from mistakes and failure and to support an innovation strategy open to failure throughout all the organization.
The first part of this chapter therefore presents a synthesis of the seminal contribution of Cannon and Edmondson (2005) and from the very recent contributions of Wilson and Dobni (2020) and Wilson and Broderick (2020). The second part proposes and discusses an original integrative model reflecting the design of a failure-learning oriented culture (FLOC). Finally, in the third part, we briefly discuss the first lessons learned from a still illustrative validation of this integrating model