Organization Learning from Failure Through Knowledge Network: Case Study on an Engineering Company in Japan

Making an attempt for new business and innovation to seek better performance is an essential matter for company to keep sustainable growth. Learning from failure is one of the ways to seek better performance, but it is extraordinarily rare for organizations to do it well. This paper reported a successful case study in Sangikyo Corporation in Japan. Since they succeeded in establishing a way to learn from failure, they had accumulated 41 failure case studies and lessons learned from the failures since 2005. In addition, they eventually earned thirty-five fold profits more over the past six years. In this paper, authors explored success factors for organizational learning from failure based on the case in Sangikyo Corporation, from points of willingness to serve, common purpose and communication. This paper however, just showed preliminary hypotheses for further research, and it is necessary to carefully examine them for being concrete hypotheses beyond this paper.