James Dyson, founder of the British home appliance company Dyson, succeeded in developing a bagless vacuum cleaner after 5,126 failed attempts. His bladeless fan was also born from countless trials. His many failed prototypes made him an icon of innovation. The signboard reading "Failure Institute" on the campus of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, where the nation's top talents gather, raises a peculiar question for first-time visitors: Why study failure in an era when everyone is racing to tout success stories?
In an interview with Seoul Economic Daily on the 11th, Cho Sung-ho, Director of the KAIST Failure Institute and professor at the School of Computing, said, "Success gets packaged, but failure leaves behind causes. In the end, failure is not a cost but information for innovation." He especially emphasized, "A culture that treats failure as personal defeat is becoming an obstacle to national innovation," and "The more we enter the artificial intelligence (AI) era, the more a nation's competitiveness will depend on the human capacity to endure and learn from failure."
-Why focus on the topic of failure at KAIST, where the brightest students gather?
△Our society has so far studied success strategies very doggedly. Companies compile success case studies, the government promotes only its best policies, and universities, too, showcase only outstanding achievements. But at the actual site of innovation, failures vastly outnumber successes. The problem is that these failures often disappear without being recorded. Without analyzing what went wrong and why certain choices missed the mark, society as a whole ends up repeating the same mistakes. The Failure Institute is ultimately a place that fills that void.
-What kinds of activities have you pursued?
△Lectures and seminars produce only temporary effects when people simply listen. So we emphasized ways for students to participate actively. Our first attempt was a "Failure Photo Exhibition." Students were asked to take photos capturing the emotions of their moments of failure, and then they gathered among themselves to talk about them. As empathy grew, students who had been suffering alone found comfort and developed resilience. The "Brag About Your Failed Project" event was also meaningful. Every autumn, we hold an event that compiles and publicly shares all the activities the Failure Institute has carried out over the past year.
-What does failure research mean for our society?
△Korea has greatly narrowed the technology gap with advanced countries and produced excellent research results. But we have not yet produced disruptive innovation at the level of a Nobel Prize. To move up another level, we need to change our research culture and attitude. Until now, we have risen into the world's top 10 with a "fast follower" strategy of quickly solving answers others have already laid out. But going forward, we must play a game without a manual, meaning we must become a "first mover." That inevitably comes with failure and trial and error. In a culture that does not tolerate failure, you can never create something new.
-Is a "failure culture" essential for becoming a leading nation?
△Yes. We need the capacity to realize and learn new things ahead of others through failure. But Korea's system does not allow this. Minimizing trial and error and avoiding failure at all costs is accepted as the only formula for success. The problem is that while this worked in the past, it has now reached its limits. Many people understand intellectually that things must change. But in a system where going it alone means being left behind alone, it is not easy to take the lead. Cultural innovation across our society is needed.
-Failure often becomes a kind of stigma in our society.
△After the Korean War, we grew rapidly from one of the poorest countries into an advanced nation. Throughout this process, the most important values were efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and those were seen as justice itself. The older generation that succeeded this way transplanted these values to their children. As a result, there is a deep-rooted tendency not to accumulate failure as experience or an asset but to treat it as a personal flaw. Those who fail college entrance exams are labeled losers, those whose job searches drag on are seen as falling behind, and those whose startups fail are dismissed as reckless. There is an underlying fear that once you deviate from society's prescribed path, returning is difficult. This system can be said to have robbed young people of the very opportunity to learn from failure.
-There is an assessment that today's youth are stability-oriented.
△That is because from kindergarten on, we have focused solely on technical and intellectual skills, memorizing English words and studying math ahead of schedule. There has been no room to form humanistic thinking about why I live as a human being and what I want. KAIST students are the same. They are truly outstanding in technical ability, but they have no experience of failure, and even small failures come as a great shock. What these students feel can be summed up as "anxiety about uncertainty." With no vision or sense of purpose formed for their own lives, everything inevitably feels vaguely uneasy.
-There are many complaints that failure is not tolerated in research and development (R&D).
△It is not that researchers avoid difficult research. But the problem is a structure in which, when submitting final reports, everything must be reported as if 100% complete. As a result, researchers propose only what is likely to succeed and hide it midway if failure seems possible. Revealing failure brings penalties. More seriously, failed cases do not remain as national assets. Large budgets are spent attempting technologies, but subsequent researchers are not properly informed why the effort stalled. We need a culture that recognizes failure as the accumulation of information, not as a cost. Research institutions in the United States and Europe manage failed projects in separate archives, so failure reports become the starting point for the next researcher.
-Our government has also tried initiatives such as the "Failure Expo."
△What is unfortunate is the lack of consistency. Whenever the administration changes, instead of inheriting and developing the good things, everything is swept away. I do not think this is a problem that can be changed by policy or law. Changing the culture around how we view failure ultimately comes down to people. The mindset of people, including policymakers, must change. As cases gradually accumulate and become known, I believe the culture will naturally move in that direction.
-What is the difference between "good failure" and "bad failure"?
△When Thomas Edison failed thousands of times, he said, "I have just found one case that does not work." In the end, failure is the process of finding the one case that works. If that is good failure, then bad failure is passively going through the motions without your own vision or goals, only becoming stressed and learning nothing from it. Bad failure is ultimately determined when you give up on something. As long as the challenge continues, failure cannot be so easily defined.
-Seoul National University's College of Engineering also recently launched a program funding "failure research."
△That is welcome news. It is important for this culture to spread not only to KAIST but also to other Korean universities and further into the corporate and public sectors. In fact, over the past five years, we have received many inquiries from companies and public institutions. I have given many lectures, and some companies have held their own failure photo exhibitions. As these cases accumulate and become known and the culture naturally changes, that is the direction we hope for.
-Could human failures actually decrease in the AI era?
△That is precisely what I am wary of. If AI maximizes productivity and boosts efficiency, human inconvenience will decrease. But the great legacies of human civilization have all emerged from the process of overcoming "inconvenience" and "the stress of things not going my way." In an environment without hardship, it is hard for humans to find motivation. If AI easily provides all the answers, humans may lose the power to learn from failure. Ultimately, in future society, the uniquely human mental capacity to manage failure and find meaning within it will shine even brighter.
-I hear you are preparing a new nationwide public contest.
△Soon, we will launch an "A
