Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Failure is an inherent aspect of innovation, whether undertaken by individuals, teams or organizations. While innovation failure has negative impacts, it has been associated with a range of positive outcomes including creativity, and adaptive problem solving. Despite the growing importance of teams to the innovation process, research on innovation failure has to date focused primarily on individuals and organizations. Through a systematic literature review we address the question of how leaders support their teams through team innovation failure. In so doing, we propose a definition of team innovation failure that distinguishes it from general conceptualisations of failure and seeks to overcome the lack of consensus on the concept of team innovation failure within the extant literature. We further identify five primary strategies utilised by leaders to support their teams as they grapple with innovation failure and integrate these identified leadership strategies to propose a theoretical model that depicts the relationship and interactions between each. We consequently offer theoretical insights into the nature of team innovation failure as well as practical insights for leaders and innovation practitioners as they engage with the challenge of team innovation failure.
