Success by failure

Today I was chatting with a colleague of mine about new product development initiatives, corporate score cards and (to use the lingo du jour) innovation. We were saying that companies should experiment more with new ideas and should not fear by failure, they should be able to kill a project asap when they see that it's not successful. No need to keep funding because the idea was originated by a top senior executive. Google Answer (paid service) is a good example of this. They could not compete with Yahoo , and today they stopped the initiative which was started by Larry Page. It was not easy for Google to compete with Yahoo's free service. But what I like here, is that basically Google accepts that his competition is better in this service and they see no reason to compete with them just for the sake of competing.

I believe that the concept (Question & Answers) has a lot merit for information providers and especially within corporate environment. Another interesting company in this area is Yedda