Failure is good.

There is a building under construction near St Pancreas in London and it is somewhat unique in the modern world. It’s the culmination of investment by the UK government and six of the UK’s top scientific institutes to the tune of a billion euro and will operate on an annual budget of 150 million euro.

Its primary purpose is to create a working environment where thousands of scientists and researchers from all different backgrounds and specialties can work togther under the one roof and exchange ideas.

But what will make this building unique is that for the first time since the Second World War scientists will have the freedom to explore new ideas without commercial goals or pressures. But above all they will be allowed the freedom to fail.

If you can remember being taught in science class in school. That all your experiments should be recorded whether they where successful or a failure. This was considered good practice.

Most of the great scientific leaps have been built on failure. This was a process happened for years. If a failed experiment was recorded it could be referred back to later with a fresh perspective. Or others could learn from the failure and see where it went wrong and turn it into a success.

The discovery of penicillin and the microwave, the invention of dynamite, plastic and the pacemaker were all results of experiments that initially had failed.

In the post war period science has changed. Commercial pressures have resulted in the failures being abandoned and forgotten and the successes nurtured and developed. This has left huge gaps in certain fields of science.

At the Crick Institute they are taking a very long-term view. There will be little or no immediate return on the investment and some of the results of this process will take decades.

But by encouraging this way of working and accepting failure is part of the process that in the long term the results could be outstanding and revolutionise science.

We are less forgiving in modern business – including advertising. There is huge pressure to get it right first time and not much flexibility to allow for failure.

Should we learn from the philosophy they are adopting in the Crick Institute? That we work in a way that accepts the role of failure as part of the road to success?