Museum of Failure

The Museum of Failure at 3270 M Street NW is a traveling exhibition of commercial and cultural failures that the Swedish psychologist Samuel West created in 2017 and that has toured internationally before arriving at the Georgetown M Street commercial address. The museum’s collection of approximately 180 objects represents the failures of the most ambitious companies, inventors, and cultural producers of the modern era: the New Coke reformulation that Coca-Cola abandoned in 1985 after consumer rejection; the Google Glass wearable computer that the privacy concerns and the social awkwardness of the format prevented from reaching the consumer market; the Segway personal transporter that the inventor Dean Kamen predicted would transform urban mobility and that sold in the hundreds of thousands rather than the tens of millions he projected.

The Museum of Failure’s conceptual proposition is that the failure is the necessary precondition of the innovation: the company that has never failed has never tried anything genuinely new, and the study of the specific failures of the ambitious innovators is as instructive for the aspiring creator and the business strategist as the study of the successes. The Georgetown M Street visitor who comes to the Museum of Failure encounters the most honest collection of business and design history that the M Street commercial district’s museums and attractions provide.

The M Street address at 3270 NW, across from the Kinesis fitness studio, places the museum in the Georgetown commercial district’s cultural attraction landscape. Hours run most days from 10am with extended Friday and Saturday hours. The Museum of Failure’s Georgetown M Street installation at 3270 NW provides the Washington professional and policy community with the exhibition that is most directly relevant to the specific culture of Washington ambition: in the city where every administration’s ambitious policy initiative encounters the political reality that defeats it, and where every technology company’s government contract bid represents the project that may or may not reach the implementation that the proposal envisions, the Museum of Failure’s collection of the ambitious commercial and technological failures speaks directly to the Georgetown professional’s experience of the gap between the aspiration and the execution.

The exhibition’s specific value is the permission structure it creates for the honest discussion of failure: the Georgetown professional who tours the Museum of Failure and who discusses the exhibited failures with the colleague is having the conversation about risk, innovation, and the inevitability of the failure that the professional culture makes difficult to conduct without the Museum’s specific framework. Hours run daily from 10am. Museum of Failure at 3270 M Street NW is open daily from 10am with extended Friday and Saturday hours through 8pm. The Georgetown M Street location at 3270 NW provides the Georgetown professional and the Washington visitor with the internationally traveling exhibition of commercial and technological failures that Samuel West’s collection represents.