Kim Wilcox (L) Chancellor of University of California, Riverside & Edward J. Ray (R) President of Oregon State University

"Embracing Failure to Spur Success: A New Collaborative Innovation Model" is the title of a thought-provoking article by Kim Wilcox, Chancellor of the University of California, Riverside and Edward Ray, President of Oregon State University. The writers argue that failure is happening every day in the labs and classrooms on college and university campuses and it is an essential part of the learning process. As research scientists attempt to make discoveries, they fail repeatedly in their trials and experiments but each failure provides another clue pointing in the direction of a solution. In classrooms, students are encouraged to question and analyze the information that is imparted by their professors and not only are not penalized for being 'wrong' but are urged to ask new questions and to keep going. Despite all these healthy aspects of failure, we tend to shun it in academic administration, in business, and in other areas, i.e. we tend not to talk about what doesn't work and what has not been a success. 

Wilcox and Ray say this is not the way to foster innovation and improvement in higher education. According to the authors, the best innovators in the world typically follow the mantra that failure is acceptable, helpful, and sometimes even necessary to ultimately achieving an objective. Many of the products we rely on today, from Post-it notes to pacemakers, resulted from mistakes or failures in the search for other innovations. And just about any successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur has a track record of ventures that failed. A corollary to the mantra that failure is acceptable is that an innovator should fail fast - in other words, if your project is not working out, you should acknowledge that you are not getting the results that you expected, figure out why, and then incorporate that information into your next attempt. 

The writers believe that although many higher education institutions are making progress in their research, teaching and outreach missions, the progress could be even faster and more dramatic if they did two complementary things: collaborate with each other across campuses, and embrace, share, and learn from failure. To this end, they have established the University Innovation Alliance (UIA). The UIA is a consortium of eleven major public research universities that are working together to identify new solutions to challenges throughout higher education, and then to share information about failures and successful solutions among institutions. Being open about what hasn't worked at one institution can be enormously helpful to another facing similar challenges.

As the authors concede, of this type requires trust and that's why much of the early work within UIA has been about building a community of trust.