Entrepreneurial Failure

Entrepreneurial behaviour - especially as a founder - involves risks and sometimes even promising young companies do not develop as planned. Often still stigmatised in Germany, the experience gained by the management team through the failure of their company is already seen in other countries as a valuable step towards maturing as an entrepreneur. While foundation and crisis are in themselves extremely demanding phases in the life of an entrepreneur, this applies all the more to their combination.

But what causes the development of some start-ups to deviate significantly from the business plan? Why do many young companies fail? And above all: How can failure be avoided? The Endowed Chair for Entrepreneurship is dedicated to these and similar questions in cooperation with the Chair for "Small and Medium-Sized Businesses, Start-ups and Entrepreneurship" of Prof. Dr. Jörg Freiling at the University of Bremen. The concept of failure is interpreted rather broadly and covers not only the topic of insolvency, but also companies that have been realigned, sold or successfully restructured after a crisis-like development.

The research work does not focus on the traditional insolvency reasons "over-indebtedness" and "insolvency". Rather, we look specifically at strategic and long-term influences that only culminate over time in a crisis that threatens the company's existence. The aim is to identify typical challenges and "failure factors" of young companies in order to be able to counteract them better in the future.

We want to be close to practice with our research and therefore seek contact with founders whose plans have developed much more negatively (threatening their existence) than originally planned. In a joint discussion, we would like to share with you your experiences in the context of the business crisis and make this important information available for scientific start-up research. In particular, you can help us if your affected company was an innovative and growth-oriented business idea that was confronted with a crisis-like development within the first 5 years after its foundation.

You can find more information on the research project "Entrepreneurial Failure" here in our project information sheet (in german).

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or require further information on the research project.