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Essays on Learning from Failure while pursuing Novel Innovation

Awate, Kiran, Awate

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Business Administration.
Despite significant interest on the topic of learning from failure in the management literature, we have little insight into how firms learn from failures to enhance subsequent innovation outcomes. This thesis takes a step forward in this direction by emphasizing the causally ambiguous nature of innovation, and the crucial role played by failures in helping to resolve this ambiguity. I argue that failures represent failed hypotheses, thus influencing the organization to reconsider its existing beliefs and seek out alternate theoretical explanations. In this way, failures can generate rich new insights into processes of innovation that bring about novel outcomes. In this thesis, I use three different contexts to examine how firms learn from failures. By using three different contexts, I am able to shed light on different mechanisms that help firms learn from failures in their pursuit of discovering novel innovation. In the first essay, I examine how firms learn from their own failures to enhance the novelty of subsequent innovation. In the second essay, I examine how litigation directed against a firm accused of patent infringement—a failure on this firm’s part–offers it a unique opportunity to learn vicariously from unintended knowledge spillovers during litigation. Finally, I use the context of alliances to examine how firms learn from their R&D alliance partners’ prior experience with failures to enhance their new product development capability. I test hypotheses for these studies using a unique database that captures drug development project characteristics, patent litigation and R&D alliance information pertaining to the global pharmaceutical industry.
Mona Makhija, PhD (Committee Chair)
Oded Shenkar, PhD (Committee Member)
Michael Leiblein, PhD (Committee Member)
Benjamin Campbell, PhD (Committee Member)
130 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Awate, Awate, K. (2018). Essays on Learning from Failure while pursuing Novel Innovation [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu153200966950113

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Awate, Awate, Kiran. Essays on Learning from Failure while pursuing Novel Innovation. 2018. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu153200966950113.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Awate, Awate, Kiran. "Essays on Learning from Failure while pursuing Novel Innovation." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu153200966950113

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)