A single testing failure taught Sakichi to develop innovations in his own mill.

Evidence

The poor performance of his first power loom in comparison with British Platt Bross looms in a one-year-lasting mill experiment by the Kanegafuchi Cotton Spinning Co around 1907 (Wada and Yui, 2002, pp. 26–27) taught Sakichi to develop and test his innovations under (his own) mill conditions (Mass and Robertson, 1996, p. 6; Toyota, 1988, p. 30). — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 184

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A founder whose formative humiliation by a superior foreign machine breeds a house culture of relentless in-house testing — a ready-made arc for a fictional family firm.
• BMF: A founder humiliated by a rival’s looms then building a decades-long culture of obsessive in-house testing that detonates later — the Novum Organum / Frankenstein scientist obsession as transmitted family trait. No close match in the listed library; consider adding a business-history narrative like Alfred Chandler’s Scale and Scope.