Most of what I learned as an entrepreneur was by trial and error.
One thing a leader does is to remove the stigma of mistakes.
If everything you try works, you aren't trying hard enough.
Moore's Law - The number of transistors and resistors on a chip doubles every 24 months
With engineering, I view this year's failure as next year's opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly.
If you'd asked me in 1980 what the big impact of microprocessors would be, I probably would have missed the PC. If you asked me in 1990 what was important, I probably would have missed the Internet.