"Fail small and fast"

Here's an interesting interview with Google's Peter Norvig on Slate's The Wrong Stuff (found via Marginal Revolution). The topic is Google's approach to innovation, error, and failure. I really like the admonition to "fail small and fast."

Just to chip in my own two cents -- I've discovered that academic culture* is intolerant towards failure, errors, and mistakes in general. (You learn this fast when you have a lot of bad ideas.) We treat research like building a space shuttle, not looking for a decent restaurant. We do a great job critiquing ideas and tearing apart arguments, but we're often not very good about brainstorming or being willing to fail publicly. We're very reluctant to accept the null hypothesis.

Why? It's always struck me as really odd that an occupation that is ostensibly about new ideas, innovation, and pushing the status quo ends taking such a slow-moving, conservative approach. I'm still not sure why. Some working hypotheses:

• Like politicians, professors' careers live and die by reputation. We can't afford to fail publicly. Those who do lose credibility and are forgotten.
  
• Grad school selects for the risk-averse. Bigger bets and more daring would benefit the field, but those sorts of people channel themselves to jobs that pay more and don't take 5 extra years of schooling to
  
• Committee decisions favor the cautious. Decisions about funding, tenure, and publication are all made by committee, usually anonymously.
• The old guard kills innovation. If you made your name building up theory X, and some upstart comes along arguing that theory Y is better, it's only natural to resist. I don't believe the strong, cynical version of this hypothesis, but I've seen a number of examples of generational inertia.
• The publication scale makes big bets risky. It takes several years to publish a book. If you have to write one book to graduate and another to get tenure, you don't have a lot of time to write failed books. Smaller increments might allow for more failure and therefore more innovation.
  

*This may be limited to political science; I'm not as immersed in the norms of other disciplines.