Well, the proverbial cat has been spilled and the beans are out of the bag. Wait, scratch that and reverse it. My baby InventionLand was mentioned in the Post-Gazette today. Take a look here. There is also a video. I don’t want to say too much about it, but you can read the article.

On a different note, earlier this week I gave a speech to a group of students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School. I talked about open innovation, invention, failure and what desire means to me. Thinking about the discussion led me down a few interesting paths and I thought I’d share some of it with you. Today I wanted to post about failure and its importance in inventing and next week I want to talk about desire and using it as fuel to get to where you want to be.

They say “failure is the mother of success” and it’s true. I know; I started my business from a failure. I dropped all my savings, my time and my heart into an invention that totally failed. I wanted to create a toothbrush sanitizing device. After spending money and time on something I wasn’t even sure was going to be a success, a major corporation put a similar product on the shelves right under my nose. It was a failure.

But it was a failure that nursed a success. You get up where you fall, right? You don’t go back to square one. You take what you’ve learned and apply it again. Well, I fell with an invention that was a day late for the market. But I got up with a process; something I developed in making my failure. It was a better way to create, to invent. I would iron out the rough edges in time, but it would eventually be called Inventegration.

I took this and started a business in 1989 out of my grandfather’s basement. In time, I’d gather some cash, some smart people to work with me and eventually grew that Oakmont business into an 110,000 square foot production facility with nearly 300 Inventionmen. I say Inventionmen, because that’s what these men and women are. I don’t like to use the term employee, because I feel a negative connotation with that word.

You know, I look at failures in this way: I see a failure as a mirror. For me, in inventing, this is especially important. You’ve taken an idea and built it into a well constructed, finger print free reflection of yourself. Then it fails. It smashes into hundreds of shards of mirror. To some it’s a mess; a disappointment. To me, I see hundreds of new ideas staring back at me. I just choose a new path and go on from there.

You know who is a famous failure? Thomas Edison. Edison experimented with more than 6,000 materials before he found the right one to use as a filament. When asked about it, he said, “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Imagine failing 10,000 times. Where did he get that energy; where did he get that desire? Because it takes a strong desire to persevere in the face of failure, let alone repeated failure.

Next week, I’ll keep this going and tell you about desire.