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What tech entrepreneurs can teach scientists about failure
Dom Byrne is a freelance radio and podcast producer based in Brighton, UK.
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Are universities doing enough to help students learn from their mistakes, and allowing them to see setbacks as a spur to creativity and success?
Materials scientist Mary Ryan, Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise) at Imperial College London, argues that a good training in science should accommodate learning from setbacks, wrong moves and false starts.
Too often, students judge themselves harshly by one poor exam result or failed experiment, she suggests.
In April 2026 Ryan addressed Failure in Science, a conference held at Imperial in partnership with Nature. In the third episode of a six-part podcast series that revisits some of the conference themes, she says: “People often point to California’s Bay Area as being this hotbed of innovation.
“You can very easily be a serial startup creator there. When you talk to entrepreneurs, one of the first things they tell you is the three companies that they had that failed. That doesn’t preclude them starting a new one and getting funding for it, whereas I think in the UK and probably in Europe in general, there’s more of a requirement for a track record.
“We have to shift that dynamic if the rest of the world is going to catch up with what’s happening in the US.”
I’m Dr. Stephen Webster, director of the Good Science Project at Imperial, a programme that examines what we like about research culture, and what we don’t.
And in episode three of Failure in Science, a podcast series about how to do science better, we explore failure and institutions.