The first round of triage is made by the company’s army of business, technical, and legal analysts.
If an idea survives that cut, it may make its way to Deane’s lab, a fifty-thousand-square-foot
menagerie of saws, scopes, lasers, lathes, and jacked-up computers. It employs or hosts more than
one hundred people.
By the time an invention makes it to the lab, Deane says, there are two forces at work. “One force
really wants to find a winner. The other one doesn’t want you to spend a ton of money or time on an
idea that won’t be successful. The key is failing fast and failing cheap. That’s a mantra that comes out
of Silicon Valley. I prefer the statement ‘failing well,’ or ‘failing smart.’ ”