While studies have recognized the importance of peers’ failures for a focal firm’s learning, there remains limited evidence on what specifically focal firms do in their learning from peers’ failures. Addressing this gap, we employ the opportunity-motivation-ability (OMA) framework to examine a focal firm’s exploitative and explorative activities in the face of peers’ failures. Drawing from a unique dataset of product recall events from various industries, coupled with patent data from 2005 to 2017, we discover that firms increase exploitation and decrease exploration in response to peers’ product recalls. This tendency to learn by exploitation is intensified when firms’ financial performance falls below aspiration levels and when they have a surplus of inventors. Moreover, our study reveals that decreases in inventor turnover, triggered by peers’ product recalls, result in increased exploitation and reduced exploration, suggesting inventor turnover as a mediator. This study not only contributes to the literature on learning from others’ experiences by intertwining opportunity, motivation, and ability as key factors that shape the dominant direction of a focal firm’s learning and the variations in its learning rate, but also fills a gap in empirical research by providing evidence on the specific learning activities firms undertake in response to peers’ failures.