It was in 1959, that Howard Mumford Jones in a programmatic article on the history of technology demanded that the field should devote itself more intensively to the examination of failed innovations. The analysis of failure, he argued, was of special importance for the understanding of technical development and could pave the way towards a more comprehensive, more realistic description of technological change. Furthermore, if this change was analysed exclusively based on successful developments, a distorted picture of the historical process emerges: Technical development than seems to have followed a straight rational path hurrying along from success to success.

In the last five decades, Mumford's request was repeated with some regularity but unfortunately failure studies nevertheless kept playing a more or less minor role within the field for most of the time. It was only in the late 1980s, that a couple of scholars began to turn to the analysis of failed innovations, demonstrating the benefits an examination of “blots” can bring.

The paper is going to present the development of failure studies in the past decades, summarize their outcomes and last but not least discuss the role that ICOHTEC and the different ICOHTEC symposia played for the emergence and advancement of this field of research.