Culture
of Failure: Silicon Valley
Changhwan
Hwang
Pusan
National University
In
the 21st century, many people emphasize the creativity as a virtue
of success. Therefore, we can see the
word ‘creative’ or ‘creativity’ everywhere such as advertisements, mottos of
big corporations, and even government’s rallying cries. Although people’s efforts to create innovative
ideas, not many people are able to get these ideas what can astound the world. Then, what makes people and society to be
creative? What limits people’s
creativity? In other words, what makes citizens’
have a tendency to behave differently rather than identically with others?
In
my opinion, the tendency that people hesitate to be creative or behave
differently with others comes from the fear to fail. Except few Western European and Scandinavian
countries, the majority of countries do not have enough social security system
or even anything like that. Therefore, when
people fail on business, people may not survive after their failure. Moreover, they may be considered permanent
losers in society. Steve Chen, ex-CTO
(Chief Technology Officer) of ‘Youtube’, also pointed out this problem and
mentioned Korea and Taiwan are representative cases of society where are afraid
to challenge.
Then,
what can foster the innovative society? We could find an appropriate answer in Silicon
Valley, San Francisco, U.S.A. According
to Steve Chen’s interview, Silicon Valley’s culture of failure is represented
by simple phrases: ‘Fast fail, fail often’.
It means whether you have degrees or not, you can start your own business
and even though you failed to success 4 times, you can challenge again. Under this culture of failure, failures are
just fine experiences, not the stigma for losers. Therefore, many people who have some creative
ideas start their business to see how valuable idea there is. It leads creation of many small business in
society. Historically, the majority of
innovation has been come from small business, not big corporation. At this point, this culture of failure boosts
the emergence of creative innovation.
The
most important thing at this point is people do actual challenges to estimate
the value of their new idea rather than just sitting on the desk for planning. This simple disparity creates extremely
different outcomes. Airbnb, Apple,
Youtube, Google and Tesla, these world leading companies born in Silicon
Valley. In addition, Silicon Valley’s number
of patents per person and venture investment rate are No. 1 in the world. Of course, someone might say there are many successful
corporations born without emphasis of creativity such as Samsung, Hyundai. Yes, these companies are huge and have great
economic power. However, they don’t lead
the trend of the market. They are
fast-followers, but not trend setters.
The meaning of follower and leader is significantly different. This is one of the great outcome of the
culture of failure. They create not just
the big corporations, but also the companies which leads the global trend.
Embracing
the failure means giving freedom to people to try what they want to attempt. Through thousands of attempts and failure,
the creative ideas that will astonish the world can be finally born. Attempting bravely is a kind of catalyst to
boost trials to create creative outcome.
The success of Silicon Valley as an incubator of successful ventures
came from other institutional reasons too, such as subsidies from government,
and etc. However, it seems clear that
the Silicon Valley’s innovative
perspective to acknowledge people’s failure eventually make creative outcomes
and these outcomes are leading the world trends in many field.
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