Understanding cascading failure across innovation journeys: The case of antibiotics development

Innovation failure is widespread yet remains difficult to theorize. While much existing research treats failure as an event attributable to internal mismanagement, systemic imperfections or a combination of both, more recent work emphasizes its processual and relational character. Building on this latter stream, this paper reconceptualize innovation failure as a dynamic and socially mediated process that unfolds across interrelated innovation journeys within an innovation field. Rather than asking why innovations fail, we examine how failure experiences are constituted in practice, how actors respond to them, and how these responses accumulate over time to shape innovation field dynamics. Empirically, we analyze responses to the common setback of a discontinued clinical trial in the field of antibiotic innovation in the face of increasing antimicrobial resistance. We identify three typical responses (reviving, shifting, giving up) elicited by such a setback and find that in their interaction these responses produce an increasingly constraining structure that affects innovation activities in the field. We conceptualize this dynamic as cascading failure, a process through which successive and recursive responses to setbacks transform innovation expectations into constraints for further innovation. The concept of cascading failure explains why the discourse of a “broken market” and an “empty pipeline” that charactersises antibiotic innovation has become so persistent and perfomative.