Turning innovation failures into strategic assets : exploring how novel innovation can leverage prior failure through resource reuse

Sammanfattning: This doctoral dissertation aims to explore how new innovation initiatives can harness resources from prior failures, challenging the prevailing notion that innovation failures primarily yield lessons learned. Instead, it expands the scope of reusable resources to include non-knowledge-based assets like social, technological, and organizational resources, examining their impact on post-failure ventures and innovation projects. Article 1 employs a multiple case study approach to introduce a typology of reusable resources from failed ventures, exploring their role in establishing subsequent ventures. Article 2, based on a survey, examines how the temporal and industry proximity of entrepreneurs’ successive ventures relate to resource reuse, considering the outcome of the earlier venture (success vs.failure). Shifting the focus to project-level innovation failures, Article 3 delves into a case study of three innovation revivals by a Japanese chemical firm, investigating practices and capabilities that facilitate resource reactivation from terminated projects and enhance innovation turnarounds. The dissertation contributes to the business failure and habitual entrepreneurship literature by highlighting that reusable resources, beyond just lessons learned, can actively drive entrepreneurial re-emergence. Moreover, it extends the innovation management literature by emphasizing that successful innovation revivals hinge on the maintenance and transferability of resources from innovation project failures. Firms must possess the capability to reactivate these resources and combine them with newly acquired or developed assets to foster innovative outcomes. This requires the simultaneous deployment of both transformative and absorptive capacity.