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As every popular topic, innovation is a powerful magnet for clichés — and, let’s face it, some of them suck.

For example, I’m not sure that mixing innovation and DNA is a good idea. Though I understand — kind of — what Clayton Christensen and his co-authors had in mind when writing about “ innovator’s DNA” (“…each individual…ha[s] a unique innovator’s DNA for generating breakthrough business ideas”), I cringe when I read that “successful innovation programs have a DNA consisting of seven elements.”

Dude, these days even toddlers know that DNA consists of only four elements!

Another one that rubs me is “celebrating failures.”

Sure, innovation requires a lot of experimentation, and experimentation results in failures more often than it ends up in success. Absolutely, we must accept failures, learn from them and try again, until we succeed. But why do we need to celebrate them?

In every language, in every culture, the word “failure” carries a negative connotation, and placing it in the same sentence with “innovation” makes no difference. By calling to celebrate innovation failures we might be announcing our belonging to a Secret Order of Innovators (those with a unique innovator’s DNA), but do nothing to advance innovation in places, still depressingly numerous, where the fear of failure keeps nipping innovation in the bud.

Besides, some innovation failures are so expensive that they give more reasons to mourn rather than to celebrate.

Take, for instance, drug development that still remains a highly unpredictable business.

The ultimate proof that a candidate drug has clinical benefits — meaning that it may be approved by the FDA as a therapy — comes as late as in the Phase III clinical trial. It was calculated that it costs about $1.3 billion to develop a new drug, and that 90% of these expenses (that is, $1.1 billion) represent the cost of Phase III clinical trials.

Do we have any reason to celebrate a failure worth a billion, given that the failure rate of Phase III clinical trials exceeds 50% (and even higher for cancer drugs)?

We’re not doing favors to innovation by treating it differently from other activities.

We live in a success-driven society. We should strive for success — and success only — be it an innovation project, a manufacturing process, or safety of our borders. We should work hard on decreasing the rate of failures in any of these activities — and, yes, we need to address the question of why drug development has become so inefficient and expensive.

And we should reserve celebration for those rare occasions when we succeed.

I’m even ready to consider this attitude an element of our innovator’s DNA.