James Dyson of vacuum fame describing an anecdote of failed engineering: "We saw in the moment of failure ... an idea that had huge advantages in another field."

Was he talking about the new Air Multiplier?

Whatever he was referring to, his core point about learning from failure jumped out at me because I was having a discussion with a colleague on this topic earlier this week. Some of us have a high tolerance for failure, and we learn from our own mistakes, but vicarious learning is also important. Two years ago, my friend Anne Miner who published "Vicarious learning from the failure and near-failure of others: Evidence from the U.S. commercial banking industry," in the Academy of Management Journal. This paper has a lot of interesting nuggets, but I like this one: "the individual failures that made up the industry experience represented negative situations from most observers’ viewpoints. Yet, aggregated into industry experience, the same bad outcomes had potentially positive learning value for others."

Of course, those of us who spend our time in law schools know all about learning vicariously from failure. If you approach law transactionally, that may be the main point of studying judicial opinions.

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