Innovative companies are flexible. Although innovative companies are bound to face some amount of failure simply because innovation requires taking risks, truly innovative companies understand that sometimes you can segue a failure into a success. Sometimes a product flop is just one small tweak away from a huge success.
For instance, at one point Anheuser-Busch took interest in popularizing the Asian trend of serving beer over ice. When early attempts did not produce positive results, Anheuser-Busch began looking into what other products worked well over ice. Cocktails — such as margaritas — are good over ice. Thus, Anheuser-Busch started selling premixed margaritas. The product was basically a flop. So the company tried again and this time they ended up releasing Bud Light Lime-A-Ritas, which come in beer cans and are marketed as margarita beers. That product generated over $500 million in sales in the first two years and, even better, most of those sales were in the form of category expansion. That is, Anheuser-Busch wasn’t just shifting existing customers from one product to another; it was actually adding customers in a new demographic.