The Impact of Failure and Success Experience on Drug Development

It is unclear whether the common belief that experience benefits new product development is driven by decision‐makers allocating more attention to success experience or more attention to failure experience. This article differentiates between the two aforementioned types of experience in order to explore their separate effects on new product development. We find that only late‐stage failure experience improves new product development, that success experience is more beneficial than late‐stage failure experience and that, while others’ related failure experience increases the likelihood of failure, others’ related success experience decreases it. We conducted our research in the context of drug development in the biotech industry and obtained our data from Pharma Projects. We employ logistic regression analysis to model the likelihood that a drug development project results in failure.