Data Mining of Failure

Reminds me of the AAR: After Action Review, which we did for a while.  But the important thing is to gather the data consistently, often an issue.

How the data mining of failure could teach us the secrets of success in Technology Review
These data researchers found that for startups, scientists, and terrorists alike, learning too little from experience spells doom.

by Emerging Technology from the arXiv 

Thomas Edison is often described as America’s greatest inventor. His successes include electric power generation, sound recording, and the electric lightbulb.

But Edison was no stranger to failure. He famously tested 1,000 different designs before settling on the carbon filament that became the first commercially successful lightbulb. This tenacity set him apart. “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up,” he said.

Many groups and individuals have studied the nature of success. These studies have yielded varying degrees of insight. The flip side—the nature of failure—is much less well studied but arguably more important. Little is known about the mechanisms that govern the dynamics of failure. ...."