Britain has been mismanaging inventions and ideas with impeccable style for centuries. Next spring, we will finally get a museum to celebrate the results: the Museum of Failure is coming to the UK.

Its founder, Dr Samuel West, is anticipating a warm welcome: Britain, he said, was the museum’s spiritual home. “I’ve travelled all over the world with the museum but I’ve always wanted to bring it back home because of our black humour and our support of the underdog,” he said. “The Brits totally get it.”

The Museum of Failure, a travelling exhibition, is dedicated entirely to missteps, flops and aborted ambitions. Its collection spans failed gadgets, ill-fated design experiments, culinary disasters, corporate overreach – showcasing the messy, often hilarious side of innovation.

UK-born exhibits include the Titanic, the Sinclair C5, the NHS’s national IT programme, Dyson’s Zone, Amstrad and The Body Shop. And, of course, Brexit.

Ben Strutt, an innovator who conducts workshops on how to turn failure into strategic wins, has visited the museum and said it could change the conversation about failure by normalising it.

“Visitors will see how some of the biggest, most recognisable brands in the world have failed and how 42% of all startups fail,” he said.

“They will also see how things failed in their time but were ultimately successful – like the Apple Newton paving the way for the iPhone, and Google Glass doing the same for augmented reality wearables – or how better products fail while worse ones succeed, like Betamax and VHS,” he said.

But it is not just for scoffing at. West stressed that the museum was not about ridicule but about understanding ambition, risk and the lessons embedded in collapse.

He said that despite all the talk about constructive failure in Silicon Valley and “failing forward”, for most people failure remained taboo.

“I want to reframe failure and show it is a universal and necessary part of innovation and learning,” he said. “The museum’s message is that we need to take bold meaningful risks to solve the largest problems of our times, environmental, social, economical. If we continue to glorify success and stigmatise failure we will not be able to experiment with and explore the solutions that we need.”

Fiona Murden, a psychologist who has written about failure, said the museum could help people, especially young people, think differently about risk, creativity and resilience.

But while glorifying success was a risk, she said, so was celebrating failure: “When failure is framed too positively, like it’s always a cool or enlightening experience, it can unintentionally send the message that failure is easy or without serious consequences. That risks invalidating the frustration, stress and setbacks people genuinely experience, which can be significant, especially in high-stakes or personal contexts.”

West agreed that the degree to which failures are or are not tolerated is largely cultural. “A woman came up to me after a talk I gave in Ivory Coast and she was really angry and she was right to be,” he said. “She pointed out that I was approaching failure as a rich, white, privileged western male – that if she failed in her business, her entire family would be plunged into poverty.

“It’s the same if you’re a guest worker in Dubai or Qatar on a contract: if you fail, it’s not just a matter of you doing a postmortem workshop to discover what went wrong. No, it’s your livelihood, it’s your family, it’s your visa,” he said.

Failure is also understood differently across cultures. In China, visitors came to the museum so they could, they told West, laugh at failed western products. In South Korea, a risk-averse country, visitors were simply confused by what they perceived to be a celebration of failure.

In the US, however, the museum was treated as a big joke. “In the US, failure is framed in the narrative of success, and so visitors there found the museum funny,” said West. “They just didn’t get it when I tried to tell them that sometimes failures lead nowhere; they’re painful and there’s no happy ending.”

But in Britain, where the venue has yet to be confirmed, he suspects the reception will be more intuitive. “The British sense of humour embraces that sarcastic, dark awareness that things can just go horribly wrong,” he said.