Ironically, this lesson comes from a manufacturer of hardware (mostly), Nvidia. In a “Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought-leaders” podcast lecture on the role of Vision when building companies, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia says:

[ca. 30 min. in, responding to a question about how the culture of Nvidia was built]
At the core of our company’s success is innovation. A lot of companies say that innovation is important to their company. However, I don’t think you can fundamentally say that you want to nurture the spirit of innovation as a CEO, unless you have a culture of risk-taking. We have to encourage our all of our employees to take calculated risks.

It’s a matter of courage. Most people hate to fail. If you want to be successful, I would encourage you to develop a tolerance for failure. That doesn’t mean fail purposefully. Instead, I want you to try things even though it is impossible to calculate precisely that it would lead to success, that your instincts, your intuition are something you should follow. Where would we be today, without the intuition of our employees? So you have to have the tolerance for risk-taking.

The thing about failure is this. If you fail often enough, you might actually become a failure! Which is not the same as being successful [laughter]! So the question is, how do you teach someone how to fail, but fail quickly? And to change course, as soon as you know it’s a dead end? And the way to do that, is we call it “Intellectual Honesty.” We assess, on a continuous basis whether something makes sense or not. And if it’s the wrong decision, let’s change our mind!
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That type of culture is very necessary in today’s environment, with competition coming all over the world, 24/7, especially for webservices, where ideas take no time to experiment. A particular company could throw out 20 ideas into the world. So unless you are thoughtful about risk taking, and being able to change your mind, react to market conditions, and being flexible, how are you going to stay alive?

You can almost see what I just described in the nature of older companies and in the nature of newer companies. The modern companies, look at Google, almost every single application is in Beta form! They’re trying all kinds of stuff, right? If they call it production, and it doesn’t work well, you guys would just be upset at them. So they call it BETA! So they can try a lot of things. And it it works, do more, and if it fails, get rid of it.

Innovation requires a little bit of experimentation. Experimentation requires exploration. Exploration will result in failure. Unless you have a tolerance for failure, you will never experiment! And if you don’t ever experiment, you will never innovate, you don’t succeed… You’ll just be a dweeb! That’s it!

And that’s why I dig the business of software. Not because I want to be a coder, but because it serves as an example, as an ideal of all the business ventures I want to do. The kind that encourage quick experimentation, developing and building on systems and infrastructures that allow for reducing the cost of failure, and increasing the chance of radical innovation.

Tons of other valuable lessons in that podcast, but this is the one I dug the most.

Vincent