For the past six months I’ve been proud to be part of the Innovation Group at Masterworks. Today, my colleague Josh posted about the group.

As you might surmise I was working on the technology consulting part of incubation and continue to do so as a consultant.

I think the incubation model is helpful generally. Josh’s description of incubation is helpful:

The incubation lab has one focus: We take ideas, practices and approaches — whether completely new, or new or undeveloped to the non-profit space — and carefully cultivate them.

To me the key is that there is explicit acknowledgement that the idea is underdeveloped or new. So we had permission to fail. What we didn’t have was permission to stop trying. When you are working on something truly new, failure is the cover charge. It is inevitably going to happen, the question is what do you do with that failure.

Our inclination is to run as far away from failure as we can. If you are innovating you need to sit with that failure study it and then move on like it didn’t happen to try a new, failure informed approach.

I would encourage you personally and your organizations corporately to define safe spaces for experimentation. Give yourself one or two hours a week where doing something new is the goal, not success.

What do you plan to incubate?