From Colgate Lasagna to the monoski, flops take center stage

Once cast aside as a cringe-worthy mistake, "Colgate Lasagna" has at last found fame as a top flop at the Museum of Failure. The dental care brand's 1980s culinary foray joins the lineup of epic fails on display in Los Angeles at a roving pop-up museum that has proven an ironic success.

A model of the Titanic, coffee-based Coca Cola and the flashy but under-powered DeLorean car from "Back to the Future" all have a special place among the more than 100 flops of innovation that make up the show, which first opened in Sweden in June before moving to California this month.

The inventions may trigger facepalms, but the show aims to prove that failure is indeed an option. "For technological progress you need a lot of failures along the way," said clinical psychologist Samuel West. Without the all-but-defunct monoski, for instance, the snowboard may never have seen the light of day.

"It is the same for any other social innovation, even us as individuals when we learn new things, we are going to fail. So I think we should accept it more," says West, who came up with the idea for the museum because he was "tired of the success stories."

The Museum of Failure also encourages visitors to own their own botched efforts, confessing to them on index cards and publicly posting them on a wall.