Innovative companies face failure. Innovation involves taking risks. As such, it means that innovating involves a certain amount of failure. It’s important to understand that that is just part and parcel with innovation and that you need to accept that it will happen, yet still pick up and move on. Every innovative company has faced some pretty substantial produce failures along the way.
In April 1985, Coca-Cola released New Coke. It did really well in blind taste tests but it failed spectacularly in the real world. New Coke only stayed on the market for three months. Overall, we certainly don’t think of the Coca-Cola company as a failure. Today, Coca-Cola owns Minute Maid, Powerade, Capri Sun, and around 100 other brands. Despite that highly publicized failure, the company picked itself up, moved on, and created countless other profitable and successful products.
Although Nintendo has been an extremely successful company and one that has managed to remain relevant in the highly competitive and ever-evolving world of gaming, Nintendo has drunken the bitter draft of abject failure. In 1995, the company released a product called Virtual Boy. The system attempted to make use of 3-D graphics, but they were rudimentary, the system’s headgear was bulky, and the product price was high. Virtual Boy only stayed on the market for a mere six months.