Two quotes in this article should be tattooed on the wrists of anyone serious about innovating:

–”Our policy is, we try things.”

–”We celebrate our failures.”

Both quotes, from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, come as the company announced that it was shutting down a real-time collaboration tool called Wave. Rather than say nothing about the failure or try to pretend it’s no big deal, as many companies would do, Google acknowledged the failure and called it an important learning experience.

So, which company do you think is more likely to innovate in the future–one that acts like failure should never happen or one that treats failure as a a chance to learn?

We’re obviously not advocating that you go off and make multibillion-dollar mistakes. Our book, “Billion-Dollar Lessons,” is specifically designed to help you avoid those. But it’s possible to fail on small projects, in ways that help you spot opportunities before the other guys do. Like Google, you can follow our recipe:

–Think big. Google envisioned a product that could have changed how people worked together in any number of settings, which could have dispossessed Lotus, Microsoft and a host of other companies, stealing their users for Google.

–Start small. Google invested some time and money in the project, but the amounts were insignificant compared with the opportunity.

–Fail fast. Google didn’t let the project drag on for years. It tried Wave and, when users didn’t show up, killed it quickly.

–Scale. That wasn’t an option for Wave, but you can bet that Google was ready to roll Wave out rapidly, if it had worked.

If you follow that recipe, you still won’t be as successful as Google–but you’ll do an awful lot better than most companies do when it comes to innovating.