This Psychology Professor Built a Museum of Failure: 70-Plus Flops From More Than 60 Famous Companies

In a year of upheaval and division, Samuel West thinks the habit of learning from failure and chaos matters more than ever.

To ride the frozen-food wave, Colgate launched beef lasagna in 1920;

To cash in on its name, Harley-Davidson — a company built on wild freedom — launched Harley perfume in 1990;

To grab a piece of the premium coffee market, Coca-Cola launched a coffee cola in 2006;

...

Apart from all coming out of big companies, these products have one more thing in common: every one of them failed. Most people never got to see them, or to hear the stories behind them.

Now there is a Museum of Failure in Sweden devoted to exactly that — more than 70 failed products from the 1940s to the present, drawn from over 60 well-known companies around the world.

Its founder is a Swedish psychology professor who had grown sick of success stories: Samuel West, who thinks "tiresome successes are all alike, while every distinctive failure is different in its own way."

"Everyone knows the failure rate in innovation is 80 to 90 percent. That's no secret," he says. "So what about all those failed products? Why do we only ever hear about the successes?"

Three years ago, as part of his research on innovation, Samuel started collecting failures. They had to come from what he defines as innovative companies — companies that keep shipping successful products or services. Along the way he made a point of visiting the Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia, which collects the gifts couples discard when they split up. That visit gave him the idea that failed products, too, could get a museum of their own, with all the ritual that implies.

Besides teaching people that failure is unavoidable in innovation, Samuel wants something larger: that companies and governments alike learn to admit mistakes, talk honestly about the problems in front of them, and learn from failure and chaos. In a year of upheaval and division, that attitude matters more than ever.

The museum started publicizing itself two weeks ago. In the 14 days since, Samuel has fielded four or five phone interviews a day, and more than 20 news outlets worldwide have covered him.

A week ago the museum turned up on the American talk show Late Night with Seth Meyers, where the host said: "Sweden's Museum of Failure opens to the public in June. If you can't wait that long, you can go see this one in Washington first" — and the screen showed the White House.

In January the museum appeared as a pop-up at an innovation conference the digital marketing firm Mirum held in London. Invitations have kept coming since — Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, Turkey, Singapore. Samuel says the pop-up calendar now runs into 2018.

That a museum of failure could draw this much global attention this fast is nothing Samuel expected. His schedule is almost entirely pop-ups now — "but it's simple enough: my pop-up museum lives in four suitcases. I take them to the airport, check them in, and show up."

Some of the Museum of Failure's exhibits

1920

Colgate: beef lasagna

1975

Sony: video cassettes, discontinued in 2012

1985

Blockbuster: DVD rentals, bankrupt in 2010

1989

Trump: Trump: The Game

1990

Harley-Davidson: Harley perfume

1993

Apple: the Newton handheld, discontinued in 1997

1995

Kodak: the DC40 digital camera, bankrupt in 2012

1999

Rejuvenique: the electric face mask

2004

Nokia: the N-Gage handheld game console

2006

Coca-Cola: coffee cola

2008

Twitter: the Twitter phone

2012

Google: Google Glass, discontinued in 2015

2012

BIC: Bic For Her, pens for women, discontinued in 2016

It sounds easy now, but gathering the collection cost Samuel plenty. He had counted on companies volunteering to donate or at least talk about their old failures. He badly underestimated how tight-lipped they are.

Samuel lives in Sweden, and he assumed IKEA, headquartered there, was in the bag. This Californian has spent 18 years in Sweden and was sure it was an open, transparent country. "People like to share, there are no secrets here," he says. What he did not see coming was that "the moment you say the word failure, everyone goes quiet."

He reached at least 15 people inside IKEA — innovation, public relations, social media, and more — and put it as gently as he could: "As a hugely successful international company, could you donate some failed products to my museum?" "Oh, what a nice idea, I love your museum, ha ha, very funny. Let's keep in touch, bye." Then they hung up.

Over those repeated approaches to IKEA it dawned on him that failure is, for a company, an extremely touchy subject.

So he changed tactics. No more casting a wide net, no more writing to official company addresses or calling the front desk, since switchboard operators could never find him the right person. Instead he went through social media, messaging companies' official LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. Companies now care enough about these more transparent, livelier platforms to staff them around the clock.

He wrote, for instance, to the Swedish carmaker Volvo — bought by China's Geely in 2010 — on Facebook: "Volvo is a highly innovative car company, but it has made some mistakes along the way. Could you share a few of those products, and your thoughts on them?"

Nothing came of it. "They just ignored me." "I was disappointed, but not surprised. I know companies keep quiet about what they're working on and what they're planning. I understand that."

So all 70-odd failures in Samuel's collection came from interviews with consumers and from research materials.

In those interviews he learned that one reason companies say nothing about failed products is to protect their image. Let it out that a company sank, say, 2 million euros into a flop, and the signal to investors and to the market is negative — it hits the share price directly. And if a recent failure leaks, competitors immediately learn which way its research is heading and how far along it is.

As a psychology professor, Samuel gets it. People are no different. Few of us make our failures public; what we show is mostly the shiny bits. "We're a lot like these companies. In front of friends, on Facebook, we put out an image of ourselves. It's an image — not always true, but the one we want people to see."

Companies gave him nothing in the end, but the reception the museum has had around the world seems to have taken the sting out of that.

When Samuel went back to San Francisco in 2014, he remembers that every restaurant and café he walked into had the same sign on the door: no Google Glass wearers allowed.

Google Glass, naturally, is in the museum.

The exhibits span nearly 80 years, but the failures of the past decade look strikingly alike. Products like Google Glass expose the technological trap of this particular era: in the race to be first into a market, more and more things ship while still prototypes, some with no working function at all.

They arrive in front of consumers at astonishing speed and disappear just as fast.

Google Glass launched in 2012 at $1,500. Google generously handed early units to the famous people of the internet age — bloggers, tech reporters — to try. Those early adopters found it was indeed cool, and that was all. "Google completely screwed it up. It was a prototype. The technology wasn't finished, the battery didn't work. It had no functions. It was a lens," Samuel says.

Worse, with a microphone and a camera on your face, Glass raised questions of decency and privacy. Nobody wants to be watched around the clock.

As a product and as a moral proposition, it failed completely.

Google Glass went out of production on January 15, 2015.

Silicon Valley's other giant, Twitter, walked into the same trap, and it too is on display. In 2008 Twitter worked with Peek to release the $200 Twitter Peek. Its main feature — its only feature — was tweeting. It could not make calls or send email.

Set aside the question of whether a phone that can't make a call is a phone: the screen was so small it couldn't display a full 140-character tweet, you could receive no more than 25 tweets at a time, and you could only have one Twitter account. The design flaws left it with nothing to compete on. "By the time this phone came out, there were already plenty of phones with mobile internet," Samuel says.

What the Twitter phone and Google Glass have in common is that how advanced or how groundbreaking they really were was never established. Technology was not democratized, and ordinary people got nothing out of either.

Globalization has sharpened competition in recent years, which explains part of why companies trade quality for speed. But Samuel has found one trap that companies past and present alike fall into: an obsession with shipping a new product or a new service without ever asking why.

The new thing answers no real customer need and carries no value in reserve. History keeps staging this tragedy.

In Victorian Britain (1837–1901), once people worked out what electricity might be good for, they could hardly wait. "They used this exciting, magical new thing to make all sorts of new products — some of them dangerous!" Samuel says. There was the electric corset "every married woman should wear," said to give off healthy energy and cure back trouble, colds and rheumatism. There was the electric comb for constipation and malaria.

It sounds ridiculous now, but the era's appetite for creating things simply to create them made it happen.

One exhibit is an extreme and complicated tragedy: Kodak. In 1996 Kodak was the fourth most valuable company in America, and it never escaped a culture of standing still.

Kodak built a digital camera in 1975. Management's response was: "That's cute, but don't tell anyone about it." They feared digital would eat into the very profitable film-processing business, and refused to make any decision that threatened what they already had.

Even after the DC40 digital camera came out in 1995, the company kept trying to sell people cameras plus the matching printers and paper, still betting on the old way of making money.

Kodak's boldest move, in Samuel's view, was launching the photo-sharing site Ofoto. The pity is that they treated online sharing as an offshoot of the existing business rather than a new business. And when people switched to taking pictures with their phones, Kodak still would not change its model. "They were too stubborn," Samuel says.

Leica, by contrast, didn't release a digital camera until 2006, and now takes in $360 million a year.

Kodak did look outside for help — to the Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, whom The New York Times called the "innovation czar" and who wrote the bestsellers The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution. In an interview with Harvard Business Review, Christensen said he once spent three days in discussion with Kodak, and the conclusion Kodak reached was this: the innovator's dilemma was precisely Kodak's dilemma, and doing everything right was its biggest mistake.

To break the dependence on the parent company, Kodak took Christensen's advice and set up a separate product division to build and sell something cheap and low-resolution: EasyShare, which at one point held a third of the US camera market.

The rest of the story is familiar. A new CEO arrived, decided the separate division was no different from the traditional ones — thin margins, extra cost — and folded it back into the existing structure. Camera share promptly dropped to 12 percent, and the business was eventually sold to Flextronics, the Singapore-headquartered electronics manufacturer.

Samuel put Kodak's cameras in the museum not to argue that the products failed, but that the strategy did: "Kodak invented the digital camera and manufactured it, and in the end the digital camera destroyed Kodak."

Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and 16,000 people lost their jobs. That same year, Instagram sold to Facebook for $1 billion.

When we asked Samuel who, if anyone, has to answer for these failures, he said the trail often leads to marketing. Marketing is the department that collects the latest news from the market, and it is treated as the listening post for what customers want. That is exactly why its advice is so hard to refuse.

Peter Thiel and Blake Masters wrote in Zero to One that as long as a company is innovating, the startup isn't over; the moment innovation stops, the startup is over.

Because "innovation" is such a fashionable word, it sometimes gets narrowed down to launching a new product or a new service — and marketing is where that kind of "innovation" is manufactured.

Marketing never runs out of thrilling ideas. Even when R&D says the product isn't finished, marketing can talk them into believing the window is closing and they have to move now.

Bad decisions higher up, though, can be more catastrophic still, and worse in "autocratic" cultures. Samuel points out that at the more hierarchical, bureaucratic companies of Asian countries such as China and Japan, employees are used to doing whatever the boss says — the worst possible soil for innovation.

Stephen Sass, a Cornell professor who once taught in China, has said: "I do not believe China will soon take the lead in innovation — at least not before its institutional culture shifts from suppressing dissenters to supporting free speech and encouraging critical thinking."

Innovation, he argues, cannot happen without doubt and without critical questions.

On this, many Asian companies have improved. To get closer to Silicon Valley, the world's center of innovation, a good number have set up R&D arms or research institutes there in recent years — Baidu, JD.com, Suning among them. In March this year Didi announced a Silicon Valley institute of its own.

Silicon Valley has always been seen as the place most willing to accept failure and to talk about it. The rule it holds to, Samuel says, is: "Build a company culture that accepts failure, so you can make small mistakes and avoid catastrophic ones."

Kodak's bankruptcy may be one of the saddest episodes in business history, and behind it sits the problem of reinvention that thousands of companies face. Christensen argues that transformation is hard by nature, especially for mature companies. However good the people they hire, those people have to follow the workflows and business models already in place. Those processes worked in the past and are the safest choice — and they also guarantee that innovation fails.

Look back at the hundreds of American department store chains: only Dayton-Hudson, the company that became Target, made the jump to discount retail. And every last minicomputer company was routed in personal computers.

"When disruption arrives, an organization's strengths become its obstacles," Christensen writes in The Innovator's Solution.

He has given countless interviews by now, but asked about his own failures Samuel still looked caught off guard. He says he has no shortage of novel ideas; they just tend to die quietly because he can't afford them. Building the Museum of Failure forced him to see that "if I don't find a way to make money from this one, the Museum of Failure will die young too."

For now the museum draws a small amount of research funding from Lund University in Sweden; 90 percent comes out of Samuel's own pocket, including what he pays his assistant and two museum designers.

Money is tight, and still he refuses to go looking for sponsors. He wants the museum independent, controlled by no company. "Even if a company sponsored it, they wouldn't get to decide what's shown and what isn't. I don't want to trade my freedom for corporate money."

His plan for now is to recover some of the cost through pop-ups around the world. Most of the invitations come from innovation and technology conferences, where he shows the collection and gives a talk.

At those events he inevitably runs into his "old foes." At the January conference in London, the booths next to his belonged to Adobe and Microsoft, "and everyone walked over to look at this rather strange museum. It was a huge success."

One visitor stood in front of the Nokia N-Gage, thinking. This was Nokia's first dedicated handheld game console, released in 2004, a phone and a game machine in one. Critics found too many flaws in both the operating system and the design: changing games meant taking the device apart — power it off, pop off the back cover, pull out the battery. And "they had almost no games. Basically two worth playing," Samuel says.

In its first week on sale, Britain's 6,000 game shops sold fewer than 500 units between them. Production stopped in November 2005.

The man standing in front of that machine was Nokia's current head of innovation.

(If you want more, you can watch Samuel walk through the failed products in the video.)

Images courtesy of Samuel West.