Photo: Samuel West
Harley Davidson Eau de Toilette was never a big hit with the general public. Perhaps folks assumed it would smell sweaty.
There are creative people out there who become obsessed with a topic, collect memorabilia related to the topic, and end up starting a museum.
Back in April, Derek Hawkins wrote about one such museum at the Washington Post. “In his years as an innovation researcher at Lund University in Sweden, Samuel West got sick of hearing the same story over and over — the tired narrative of the nerdy innovator from humble beginnings whose brilliant idea made him a millionaire.
“ ‘Everybody in the innovation business knows that 80 to 90 percent of projects fail,’ West, now an organizational psychologist, told The Washington Post. ‘So where are all these failures? Why do we only read about the successes?’
“To chip away at those questions, West started buying failed products online. At first, he did it for his own amusement, but it quickly turned into an obsession. Eventually, he said, he amassed dozens of items.
“Now, his one-of-a-kind collection of flops is getting a permanent home.
“In the coming weeks, West is set to open the Museum of Failures in Helsingborg, Sweden, celebrating some of the corporate world’s most extreme misfires. The goal, he said, is to show that innovation requires failure. Every exhibit offers ‘unique insight into the risky business of innovation.’ In other words, we can all learn a lot from bad ideas, so we should stop pretending they never happened.” For more, see the Washington Post and also Business Insider.
To hammer home the point about failure, I think the museum would be well served to include a section on failures that led directly to successes. Perhaps a Swedish reader will go to Helsingborg and let us know if West has done that.
By the way, since we’re talking about unusual museums, here’s the link for the Museum of Broken Relationships and an article about the now defunct Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, which my husband and I always took guests to see when we lived in Minneapolis.
12/8/17 Adding another article on the same topic, here. This Museum of Failure is a pop-up museum in Los Angeles. Guess it’s an idea whose time has come.
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