The second Green Templeton Lecture in the 2026 series turned deliberately to the most uncomfortable stage of innovation: failure. In a health sector that prizes breakthroughs, scale and success stories, the panel challenged us to confront a harder truth – that in health innovation, if you are not failing, you are probably not innovating at all.
Following the opening lecture’s exploration of discovery and possibility – including the use of AI supercomputing to accelerate cancer vaccine development – this second session explored what happens when innovation doesn’t go to plan?
Titled Fail: Where real innovation is forged, the lecture brought together perspectives from venture capital, entrepreneurship and leadership research to explore why failure is both inevitable and essential in health and life sciences. In science, negative results are rarely published, yet they often contain the most valuable insights. In entrepreneurship, the ventures that succeed are seldom those that execute a perfect first plan, but those that learn quickly, pivot decisively and adapt when reality intervenes.
A recurring theme was the difference between tenacity and stubbornness. Dr Matthew Frohn, co-founder of Longwall Venture Partners highlighted that venture capital is not about backing guaranteed winners, but about recognising uncertainty, accepting the role of luck and identifying “terminal problems” as early as possible. Technical challenges and market fit can often be fixed; people, leadership and team dynamics are far harder to repair and are more frequently the true cause of failure.
Dr Susanna Kislenko, Director of the Founder Leadership Research Lab, has shown through her research into Founder’s Syndrome the early warning signs that can derail innovation: founders who hoard information, lack long term strategy, or surround themselves with yes people rather than constructive challenge. Good governance, she argued, is not bureaucracy – it is protection against catastrophic failure, particularly in high stakes health contexts.
Yet the most powerful insight for many in the room was that failure is not experienced equally. The panel acknowledged that current innovation ecosystems do not give everyone the same freedom to fail openly. Women and minorities are more likely to lose credibility when things go wrong, while “straight white men (people who look like Steve Jobs)”, as Susanna explained are celebrated for resilience and honesty. Creating psychologically safe environments where mistakes can be shared and learned from is therefore not just good practice – it is a matter of equity and system design.
As the series moves towards its final lecture on Fly: From breakthrough to system change on 13 May, this second session was a timely reminder that sustainable health innovation depends not only on bold ideas, but on cultures, governance and ecosystems that allow innovators to fail well, learn fast and keep going.
You can read the full write up of Lecture 2: Fail – Where real innovation is forged here.
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