Do firms learn from others’ innovation experiences? The literature on vicarious learning suggests that firms learn from others’ failure experiences, but this empirical evidence mainly stems from operational disasters rather than innovation. The literature on alliances suggests that firms learn from their alliance partners in innovative contexts, but it has not considered whether partners’ innovation experience—particularly success versus failure experience—influences the focal firm’s innovation outcomes. Neither stream of literature considers what firms learn or the limits to such learning. We investigate these questions in the context of firms’ learning from others’ clinical trial experience in the pharmaceutical industry. We find that firms’ introduction of successful new drugs increases with their own and their partners’ failure experience, thus identifying boundary conditions to claims in prior work on vicarious learning. In addition, we find that increasing partners’ experience is associated with the introduction of more novel drugs by the focal firm and increased selectivity in its clinical trials. Meanwhile, it is neither associated with chemical complexity (molecular novelty) in its drugs nor with improved success in areas outside of the alliance scope. This finding suggests that learning from alliance partners may be confined to context-specific development knowledge rather than more general scientific knowledge. Despite limitations imposed by our context and measures, our results suggest important avenues for future research.