Entrepreneurial Failure

This collection contains 36 previously published articles (from 1986-2011) that explore that causes and consequences of entrepreneurial failure. They examine the initial conditions surrounding the founding of a new venture, including the ＂honeymoon＂ period that sustains the firm, new organizations founded in adverse environmental conditions, and the failure of independent new organizations and new ventures that are subsidiaries of a parent organization; the managerial and strategic causes of failure, such as differences between young and older firms’ failure, managing newness, the role of overconfidence, and the link between entrepreneurial orientation and positive firm performance; the financial predictors of business failure (financial statements and accounting measures); and entrepreneurial failure from an evolutionary perspective, with discussion of the liabilities of newness and smallness, the relationship between age and firm mortality, and how process and context interact to shape outcomes. The second section focuses on outcomes of failure, including the opportunity to learn from experience and the anti-failure bias among managers and scholars, barriers to learning from failure, and the relationship between the business ownership experience and the number of opportunities recognized and the innovativeness of those exploited; how failure can impact the motivation to try again, with discussion of the over-optimistic nature of entrepreneurs who have failed and the new transaction commitment mindset; business failure and emotional reactions, the need for more on failure in entrepreneurial education, family businesses, and the learning process for subsequent entrepreneurial action; project failure reactions, frequency, impacts on learning and commitment, and project-termination decisions; blame and stigma, including bankruptcy and the views of venture capitalists; delay of failure and the reasons and costs of persistence; cultural differences; and failure-avoidance strategies in alternative exit routes. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)