FLOP Museum

FLOP Museum in Oslo showcases legendary product failures and missteps in innovation, highlighting the lessons learned from these experiences.

Planning your visit

The FLOP Museum collects failure, and it is a genuinely useful corrective to the way innovation is usually narrated. The Oslo museum displays products that flopped — commercial disasters, misjudged launches, technologies that never found a market — and the interest lies in the reasoning that produced them, which at the time was rarely stupid. Most of the objects were made by competent people at successful companies who read the market wrong.

The format sits alongside similar collections elsewhere, and the argument they share is that failure is the ordinary condition of product development rather than an aberration, and that survivorship bias makes innovation look far more orderly in retrospect than it was. Each exhibit carries the story of what was intended and what actually happened.

It works well as an hour's diversion, and it lands particularly with anyone who works in product, design or marketing — the recognition is uncomfortable.

Oslo has become an unusually museum-rich city, with the Munch museum, the National Museum and the Fram polar ship all recently rebuilt or relocated, so this fits easily into a wider day. The main booking is an entry ticket. Current availability is shown below.