Where Corporate America Learns History Lessons

Fortune 500 long timers like Procter Gamble, Delta Air Lines, and Coca-Cola have poured resources into in-house museums, hoping to learn from the triumphs—and mistakes— of bygone days.

- PHIL WAHBA

IT TOOK FIVE DECADES of failure to turn Tide Pods into an overnight success.

The "unit-dose" detergent pods became one of the biggest-ever hits for consumer products giant Procter & Gamble not long after their 2012 debut. But P&G had launched an earlier attempt in the 1960s, called Redi-Paks, to utter indifference from consumers. Other iterations in the following decades, such as Rapid Tabs in the 1990s, also fizzled; the company just couldn't quite master the formula for optimal release of the detergent. That is, until it did; now Tide Pods are a top seller in a $3 billion market.

Today, the Tide Pods' failed forebears have a place of honor in the "Wall of Failures" exhibit at P&G's Heritage Center and Archives in Cincinnati-an internal museum at headquarters aimed at helping P&G's product-development teams find the next big thing.

The Heritage Center isn't open to the public, but guests are welcome to visit, and staff are urged to do so. Over the years, the company has kept meticulous records of its misfires, seeing them as a valuable resource.

"Failure cases are a critical learning area," says Shane Meeker, P&G's historian and corporate storyteller. "If you're not failing, you're not innovating." P&G is hardly alone among big corporations in running an in-house museum. Countless others meticulously maintain storehouses of records, prototypes, board meeting minutes, discontinued gadgets, old press releases, marketing materials, and all manner of paraphernalia. In Billund, Denmark, Lego has five miles' worth of shelves in climate-controlled facilities where it stores nearly every "brick set" it has ever produced.