To Learn or Not to Learn from New Product Development Project Failure: The Roles of Failure Experience and Error Orientation

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 prespetives, 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.