To learn or not to learn from new product development project failure: The roles of failure experience and error orientation
研究调查了237名高科技企业新产品开发项目负责人，发现项目失败比例越高越不利于学习，但错误能力能削弱这种负面效应；而距离上次失败的时间越长越有利于学习，但错误压力会削弱这种正面效应。
New product development (NPD) project leaders' learning varies after experiencing project failure, as not all failure experience equally promotes learning and not all project leaders equally learn from failure. Drawing on the sensemaking and error management perspectives, this study focuses on two research questions: to what extent does project failure experience (i.e., the percentage of project failures in the overall project portfolio managed by a project leader and the time elapsed since last project failure) affect NPD project leaders' learning from failure? To what extent does a project leader's error orientation (i.e., error competence and error strain) moderate the effect of project failure experience on NPD project leaders' learning from failure? Based on survey responses collected at two distinct time points from 237 NPD project leaders in high-tech ventures, our results show that the percentage of project failures negatively affects learning from failure, and their negative relationship is weakened as error competence increases. In contrast, the time since project failure positively affects learning from failure, and their positive relationship is weakened as error strain increases. Our findings emphasize that a simplistic approach to learning from failure fails to uncover the transformative mechanisms involved in turning failure into learning in the NPD process. Instead, we suggest a customized approach to comprehending how project leaders can capitalize on project failure considering their failure experience and error orientation to learn from NPD project failure.