Friends of Strategy Science,
We are pleased to announce the 2026 Strategy Science Best Paper Award has been given to:
Victor Manuel Bennett and Jason Snyder
for their paper
"The Empirics of Learning from Failure,"
Strategy Science 2:1, pp.1-12, published in 2017.
From the comments of the awards committee:
"This paper makes a distinctive and timely contribution by uncovering a fundamental methodological flaw embedded in a widely used empirical specification, one that has shaped an entire literature's conclusions about organizational learning. The paper begins with a puzzle: qualitative studies consistently find that learning from failure is the exception, while econometric studies find it to be robust and significant. Rather than attributing this divergence to differences in setting or measurement, Bennett and Snyder trace it to a structural problem in the standard empirical approach itself. Using simulated data in which no learning occurs by construction, the authors demonstrate how flawed results that appear significant may emerge. The paper suggests and implements an alternative empirical specification using liver transplantation data, which illustrates the problem as well as a potential remedy – demonstrating how the methodological problem may drive misleading findings about the likelihood of learning from failure.
The reasons for selection include:
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Critical problem in the learning literature. The paper resolves a long-standing and consequential puzzle in the learning literature. The divergence between qualitative and econometric findings had resisted explanation for years. The paper identifies how existing findings may be misleading. Scholars often assume large samples are more reliable but here, absent the suggested remedies, qualitative studies are more informative.
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Possible applications beyond learning from failure. The flawed specification (regressing outcomes on cumulative successes and cumulative failures simultaneously) is widely used wherever researchers study the performance effects of accumulated experience. Thus, corporate strategy research on cumulative M&A and alliance experience, and strategic human capital research on managers' accumulated functional or firm-specific experience, are both potentially affected. More broadly, many research areas work with cumulative count data. By critically evaluating the data generating process, the paper's careful diagnosis of why erroneous results occur serves as an exemplar for many research areas.
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Judicious methodological inquiry. The paper exemplifies the kind of self-scrutiny that a healthy scientific community necessitates. The field has made great progress in addressing difficult challenges like endogeneity or causal identification, but the problems documented here, largely overlooked despite their importance, serve as a reminder that methodological vigilance must be ongoing.
In recognizing this paper, the committee sought to highlight a contribution that differs markedly from previous award winners to emphasize the journal's breadth. Methodological contributions such as this underscore the critical role of robust empirical approaches in the search for truth."
Thank you to this year's awards committee: Giovanni Gavetti, Russ Coff, and Gwen Lee.
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