Museum of Failure makes UK debut at Packaging Innovations & Empack 2026

First-ever UK exhibition brings global ‘failures’ to Birmingham to spark smarter innovation.

The Museum of Failure will make its first-ever UK exhibition appearance in February at Packaging Innovations & Empack 2026, bringing its globally recognised collection of famous flops, misguided ideas, and misunderstood innovations to the UK packaging industry for the first time.

The exhibition will invite visitors to explore how mistakes, misjudgements, and unexpected outcomes are not the opposite of innovation, but often its starting point. From Kodak’s early digital camera to modern AI misfires, the Museum of Failure curates examples of products, services, and ideas that did not succeed, and asks a simple but powerful question: what can we learn from what went wrong?

At Packaging Innovations & Empack 2026, the Museum of Failure experience will focus on how learning from failure can accelerate progress in materials development, packaging design, automation, and sustainability.

The Museum of Failure was founded by psychologist Dr Samuel West and has toured internationally since 2017. Its exhibitions reveal common patterns behind corporate misjudgements: overconfidence, fear of change, poor user understanding, technological tunnel vision, and resistance to uncomfortable ideas.

Failure is not the opposite of progress; it is the engine that drives it. Every meaningful innovation is built on experiments that didn’t quite work, ideas that arrived too early, or assumptions that turned out to be wrong. The Museum of Failure exists to make those stories visible, so people can learn from them rather than hide them. In industries like packaging, where pressure to innovate is intense, understanding why things fail is just as important as celebrating what succeeds.

Dr Samuel West.

At the exhibition, visitors will see how these same traps can affect packaging innovation, from material choices and automation strategies to sustainable design and consumer behaviour.

Alongside the exhibition, the Museum of Failure will also run a dedicated workshop session, showing how organisations can use structured learning from past mistakes to: Design better packaging systems, de-risk automation projects, develop more realistic sustainability strategies and avoid repeating common innovation blind spots.

The aim is practical, not philosophical: helping packaging professionals make better decisions by understanding why good ideas sometimes go wrong.

Innovation often starts with mistakes, but too few industries take the time to study them properly. Bringing the Museum of Failure to the UK for the very first time, and to Packaging Innovations & Empack, is about giving our community permission to think differently. It’s not about celebrating failure, it’s about understanding it, so the next generation of packaging solutions is smarter, braver, and more resilient.

Josh Brooks, Divisional Director – Packaging Portfolio at Easyfairs, organisers of Packaging Innovations & Empack.

The Museum of Failure will appear at Stand A11, Hall 2 as part of Packaging Innovations & Empack 2026, which takes place on 11–12 February 2026 at the NEC Birmingham, bringing together brands, designers, converters, material specialists, and technology providers from across the packaging value chain.