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Case Study: Innovation Trauma and Resilience 71

traumatic despite their seductive (prefailure) “upside” potential. Indeed, the
connotations of Schumpeter’s famous term “creative destruction” are sug-
gestive of high emotional (and other) costs.
The personal experience that an innovator feels when an innovation in
which she or he (often together with a team of colleagues) has invested a sub-
stantial amount of effort and passion woefully betrays its hard-won expec-
tations can be described as a personal and emotional loss. Furthermore, it is
occasionally a frustration for future innovation pursuits, and it potentially
leads to cynicism about whether innovation will ever work in the company.
Interestingly, as the Sun Ray case suggests, major parts of the organization
can experience innovation trauma together (the sales department, for exam-
ple, as suggested earlier). Here are some telling quotes:

Engineering: “The original 10 [engineers] were excited about the [Sun
Ray] product release. The other 80 had just been given some choices,
told ‘you can work with us or work somewhere else.’ . . . I think a lot
of people were disgruntled that the JavaStation was killed in favor of
the Sun Ray.”
Sales: “We felt we would eventually cut the product, like we did the
JavaStation. The field did not trust the Sun Ray at all. A lot of field
reps were burned by all the flux with JavaStation.”
Customers: “I would sit in sales calls talking about how innovative we
were, and the customer would [remind us of the JavaStation] and say,
‘You guys can’t focus on anything!’”
Leaders: “[An executive at Sun] was not a fan of the Sun Ray. He never
got over the failure of the JavaStation.”

Trauma Causes Disillusionment
The JavaStation team had just experienced the severe failure of a signature
product that was heavily marketed and identified with the company to the
point where it had become synonymous with the company’s success.
JavaStations were largely touted as the network computer that Scott
McNealy and Larry Ellison claimed would dethrone Microsoft. The
JavaStation team had thus been embarrassed as an engineering team not
able to deliver on this promise. Said one director about his faith in the