http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743212126/103-1289538-4451835
The above link is for "Weird Ideas That Work", a book by Robert Sutton that I read recently. It's all about how to encourage innovative thinking in an organization by doing certain things in a different way, including a contrast with how most organizations do things in ways that encourage routine. He does point out that routine is good for many tasks, so the rules shouldn't be the only way things are done. As examples, he suggests flying airplanes and cooking fast-food hamburgers are tasks where routine is better than innovation.
Conceptually, the thoughts spurred by the book that have been most interesting to me are about failure. First is that more failures will mean more success overall because people generally have the same ratio of success to failure, so the only way to get more successes is to try more new ideas.
In conjunction with that, an organization that wants to encourage innovation should adjust reward structures to reward success and failure, and only punishes inaction. Of course, in routine work, failure should be punished, too. But punishing failures in effect takes away any incentive to try new things, since some (likely high) percentage of what is tried will fail.
At Microsoft, I've noticed that our culture is one that purports to encourage innovation, but doesn't address failure by considering rewards. I've heard second-hand that at the executive level, failures are accepted, but it's all-too-common that at the level in the company where I am, a failure ends up on a mid-year or annual review as a problem. I've been the target of this personally, especially when I was in my community lead role, which was an entirely new effort in Windows Server and required trying a lot of new things.
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Perhaps this is just a problem of semantics, but what I think you are trying to say is that one should reward attempts (assuming that they are honest attempts), even if the outcome is failure. An additional reward for success seems desirable as an encouragement.
I find a lot of quibbles and conditions running around in my head, not organized enough to write down (yet). That may be the result of a lifetime of conditioning to strive for success, which is implicit in the condition you describe at MS. Needs more thought.
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