Hi. I'm Jack Matson, and I'm going to talk about the importance of failing. I'm a professor, an innovation junkie, and someone who fails. The techniques of creativity and innovation are not difficult to understand, but are challenging to practice and implement. Why? Risks are involved, and failures result. Failures are a blow to our self esteem. Who wants a resume filled with failure? When I first attempted to teach creativity and innovation, my engineering students hated it, absolutely hated it. All they wanted was for me to teach to the test. Creativity and innovation was too squishy for them, with no right answers. They were angry and I was discouraged. But I kept trying. One evening my six year old son Brian was building a structure with these popsicle sticks. I joined in the fun and had a thought. What if I took these sticks into the classroom and had the students build a structure. Would they get down on the six year old level? Would they instantly get into the creative zone? Why not try? The next day in class, I gave the students sticks and told them build the tallest structures. The students experimented and failed a lot, I noticed, built the tallest structures. I repeated the sticks experiments with other students and the results were the same. Those who experimented and failed a lot, invariably built the tallest structures. Clearly failure was an essential part of the creative process. I coined the phrase, intelligent fast failure, or IFF, to describe what I had observed. I then applied the IFF principle to inventing products, starting up businesses, even improving my tennis game. My students started calling my course Failure 101. They learned that IFF is a learning process and it has nothing to do with self esteem. I tell my students repeatedly that I will be looking for the frequency and intensity of their failures as a measure as to how well they're doing. Experiment, fail, learn, and create. That's our mantra. I invite you to make it your mantra. Einstein was once quoted, Genius is making all possible mistakes in the shortest period of time. He certainly knew about IFF. In this course we hope to celebrate your failures as you experiment and create your future.