The Impact of Success and Failure Experience on Organizational Learning in the Biotech Industry

Our research focuses on the separate roles played by success and failure - two key dimensions of organizational experience - upon organizational learning. In contrast to some prior literature, we find that organizations learn more effectively from successes than failures. We also find that project similarity also explains whether organizations learn from others’ failures. We extend other work on learning from failure by introducing the twin concepts of related and unrelated learning and first-hand and vicarious learning.