Posted by Leslie
TED Talk Takeaways: Honda Power of Dreams Failure
- Honda’s approach to innovation – Trial and error; We can only make fantastic advances in technology through many failures; the idea is that you can fail 100 times as long as you succeed one
- When we make mistakes it’s hard to handle because everybody is focused on and wants to see the improvement
- Failure is a byproduct of pushing the envelope; innovation is pushing the envelope until things fail; failing is not a bad thing as long as you learn from it and do something positive with it
- When Honda’s racing company, Honda Performance Development, started racing in 1994, the program was a massive failure; the engines they built wouldn’t work; they would literally explode into tiny parts under the car; car after car had the engines fail
- There were a lot of failures in 1994; those failures led to a new engine in 1995
- Honda improved their engines step-by-step to a point where finally in ’95 they won their first race and in ’96 they won the championship
- Now Honda is the sole supplier for the Indy Racing League
- To improve upon something you have to take a chance and when you take a chance, more than likely mistakes are going to be made, but when you learn from it, it’s a good thing
- Thomas Edison said about the light bulb – I never failed, it just didn’t work 10,000 times
- At 10,001 it lit up
(Image via Design Taxi)
