Microsoft is a great example of company that has succeeded by execution. They’ve rarely been first to market with any of their products, but they’ve successfully brought them to market, figured out how to improve them, and introduce them again and again. This is the approach that puts you in the Fortune 500.

Why do entrepreneurs believe so fervently in the myth that they need to be first to market with a never-before-seen innovation? Because that’s what they’re told in business school. The problem with this piece of wisdom is that it encourages business leaders to wait until the mythical breakthrough business idea is fully formed.

This myth is fed by the public perception of groundbreaking companies as having come out of nowhere to rock the world. But companies like Facebook rarely, if ever, spring into being with no antecedents: MySpace and Friendster were in the market first, but Facebook did social networking better than anyone else had done before. Google wasn’t the first search engine ever; AltaVista probably deserves that title. But Google advanced the search experience to the point that we all believe they were the breakthrough innovator.

The point I’m making here is that you don’t need to have the breakthrough vision to launch your company – you need to have breakthrough execution. Launch your company even if your concept is similar to someone else’s idea, and figure how you will change the business model.

When you stall your entry into the market, you run the risk of getting outrun by competition – who’ll have gathered valuable on-the-ground information and solved problems before you’ve even planned your launch party. At a certain point, the ecosystem around your market will have become so strong that consumers will not be willing to accept a new entry. For example, anyone who launches a Facebook-style social network right now will have to hope that people are willing to totally rebuild their friend networks from the ground up.

On the other hand, if you can tweak this idea for a new market – for instance, a social network that specifically serves the healthcare community – you can launch without an entirely new concept. Or you can go to a locale where you’re not first in the market, but where there is greater potential to become a player.

In other words, you can be first to market in Seattle with widget XYZ, where there’s only a moderate interest and market potential for your product. Or you can be tenth to market in Tulsa where there’s a far greater need for widget XYZ, giving you plenty of room to gain customer share. Here’s how to position yourself for entrepreneurial success without playing the waiting game.

Follow your heart – but use your head. As an entrepreneur, you should always develop businesses that you are passionate about, since that enthusiasm will keep you pushing ahead when times are tough. But that doesn’t mean you can’t think rationally about how to apply what a competitor is doing to a different market segment or locale.

Listen to the market, and tweak as needed. The reason for launching sooner rather than later is to gather feedback from initial customers, so that you can redesign or retool as needed. Without this early feedback, you can only guess as to what customers are willing to pay for.

Don’t wallow in brainstorming. Time spent fiddling with a business plan or filling up whiteboards with ideas is time that you could spend actually launching your business and seeing if the idea floats. If it’s real, you get solid feedback, instead of the imaginary “what if” scenarios you dream up in a conference room.

Launch early enough that you’re partially embarrassed by your first product release. Entrepreneurs are likely to be somewhat off-base about their first launch and what features customers really want, but they won’t make a product better until people are actually using it. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman says that his co-founders wanted to delay launch until they introduced the professional social network’s “contact finder” feature, but it turns out it wasn’t necessary — eight years later, LinkedIn still hasn’t added that feature.

Be your own worst nightmare. Once you do have that toehold in the market, ask yourself how you would outflank your company if you were a competitor. Constantly out-innovate yourself, and determine how to make your product offerings obsolete with each iteration.

Follow Naveen Jain on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Naveen_Jain_CEO

In a struggling economic climate, failure is what separates mediocre companies from businesses that break through and astound us with their creativity.

Yet failure has become a scenario to be avoided at all costs for most CEOs. Between fear of losing jobs to fear of rattling investors, business leaders are expected to deliver a perfect track record of product launches and expansion programs. They indirectly instill this attitude in their employees, who lack the confidence to spearhead any corporate initiative that isn’t guaranteed to work.

Call it the Tiger Mom effect: In the business world today, failure is apparently not an option.

We need to change this attitude toward failure – and celebrate the idea that only by falling on our collective business faces do we learn enough to succeed down the road. Sure, this is a tough sell at a time when unemployment figures are still high and a true economic recovery is still a long way off. But without failures, no business can grow and innovate.

Why is it that we are willing to accept a certain amount of failure along with success in other arenas, but it’s forbidden in business? Take basketball: The best player on his best night will only score about 50 percent of the time. The other 50 percent of the shots aren’t considered failures – they are attempts to test playing strategy that will figure into dunks later in the game.

If a basketball player is scoring close to 100 percent of the time, he is clearly making layups and not considering the three-pointer that may be needed to win the game. The same is true for business leaders: if every one of your pet projects rolls out successfully, maybe you aren’t stretching far enough.

Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn’t always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up, Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company’s core business had failed to catch fire. But the company learned lessons from its mistakes, and shifted focus to the development of flawlessly designed consumer electronics goods. Yesterday’s failures bred today’s market dominance.

Fail today, profit tomorrow
The good news about failing is that this is a smart time to do it. Today, the cost of failure is much lower than it used to be. And if you take chances while the economy is down, your successful business launch will grow and become exponentially more profitable as times improve.

Strange as it may sound, a positive attitude towards failure starts at the top. Here’s how business leaders can create an environment where failure is encouraged, not punished.

Applaud people who fail: As a leader, you need to praise people who take risks and explore new ways to gain market share, since short-term failures can lead to the biggest business successes down the road. Talk publicly about why the failed venture has merit, and what your employees have learned from it. At performance review time, let the innovators who dare to fail know that you value their contributions.

Acknowledge your own failures: When you experience a failure as a leader, don’t hide it – talk about it. Your missed opportunity will encourage others to take risks. When you tell personal stories about your own failed plans, you give permission to everyone in the organization to do the same, without fear of reprisals. (Of course, you should always remind people that they should dig deep for lessons learned from every failed attempt.)

Create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship: Grant people the time to work on projects that they are passionate about – beyond their daily responsibilities. This sends employees a signal that their failures as well as their successes have great value to the business. Google does this, allowing its engineers to spend 20 percent of their work time on side projects. You can’t argue with success: Google’s Orkut social networking service and AdSense ads for website content came directly from this “20 percent time” program.

So get out there and fail – and take inspiration from Thomas Edison, who suffered through more than a thousand experiments before finally inventing a working light bulb. “I didn’t fail a thousand times,” Edison told a journalist. “The light bulb was an invention with a thousand steps.”

Follow Naveen Jain on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Naveen_Jain_CEO