How size of failure affects learning from failure in innovation

Abstract

Learning is the only process that can turn failure into success. By reviewing extant studies about failure and learning from it, we found that the literature has remained silent concerning how size of failures affect learning by individuals, groups and organizations. To help fill this gap, we explore how failure magnitude affects the learning process, and the degree to which small failures and large failures entail learning. This is an important issue since the magnitude of failure leads to different learning ability under two types of learning: learning from self- experience and vicarious learning (learning from the experience of others). The theoretical contribution made by this paper is the analysis of the linkage between size of failure and learning from failure in innovation activities. The practical contribution, meanwhile, is to help organizations understand the barriers as well as facilitators of learning from failures, and to aid the design organizational mechanisms for learning from failure - thus enhancing innovation in the long run.