The Dare to Try Award
I recently discovered one of the best examples of innovation culture I've ever seen, and the company's headquarters is nowhere near Silicon Valley.
Tata Group is a 157-year-old Indian conglomerate with $180 billion in annual revenue that most Americans have never heard of.
They operate in over 100 countries, employ more than one million people, and own brands you'd recognize: Jaguar, Land Rover, Taj Hotels, Tetley Tea. Boston Consulting Group ranked them #20 on their list of the 50 Most Innovative Companies in the world, the only Indian enterprise to make the cut.
So how does a 157-year-old company with a million employees stay innovative? They turned innovation into a sport that celebrates failure as loudly as success.
In 2006, Tata launched Innovista, a company-wide innovation competition open to every employee across every subsidiary, in every country. Teams submit their projects. External judges evaluate them through anonymous, multi-stage rounds. Winners are celebrated at a global ceremony in Mumbai.
When Innovista launched, 101 projects were submitted. By 2022, that number had grown to over 15,000, from 38 companies across 22 countries.
In 2015 alone, the top 60 winning innovations were projected to deliver $1.1 billion in financial benefit over five years.
One Tata Steel employee, Padmapal, has been part of 35 innovation projects over the past decade, reaching the finals nine times and winning three. They even created a "Serial Innovator" award for people like him.
But what I find most interesting about Innovista isn't any of the winning innovations. It's the award they give for failing.
In 2007, Tata added a category called "Dare to Try." It recognizes ambitious projects that didn't work. Ideas that were bold, well-executed, and ultimately fell short.
One early winner was Tata Motors' engineering team in the UK, which attempted to develop a breakthrough transmission system for the Nano car. They couldn't deliver a cost-effective product within the timeline. The project was shelved. And then they were called onto the stage and congratulated by the chairman of the company.
When "Dare to Try" first launched, Tata had to beg people to participate. Only a handful of teams submitted entries. Nobody wanted to publicly claim their failure. Then everyone watched the winners get the same recognition, from the same stage, alongside every other category. The message was unmistakable: this company doesn't just tolerate ambitious failure. It celebrates it.
Participation in the category has grown 100x since launch. By 2019, 143 teams were competing for the honor of best failure. Teams reported that the process of analyzing what went wrong, and being recognized for it, helped them uncover technology blind spots, rethink business models, and better understand their customers. Many "Dare to Try" entries became the foundation for projects that succeeded on the next attempt.
Most companies say they want a culture of innovation. They'll even tell you that "it's okay to fail" there. But Tata puts its money where its mouth is, and the results speak for themselves.
