My interviews provided a unique opportunity to discuss failed ventures and most interviewees were remarkably candid.
- Dr Keith Cotterill
Biographies of Apple co-founder and many-times-over millionaire Steve Jobs are best-sellers. The narrative of his life with its drama of highs and lows, friendships and fallings-out, makes compelling reading for anyone interested in what drives a human being to risk all in pursuing a dream. Stories are how we make sense of what’s happening around us: consider these more modest snapshots of success and failure.
British entrepreneur Henry left academia to set up a venture based on his expertise in the physical sciences. His enterprise failed, as did his second, and he remains bitter about what happened. American Priya also experienced business failures. She travelled around India to give herself thinking time and back in the USA she set up a social network for entrepreneurs. Hans is a German physicist whose venture collapsed when business partners embezzled its funds. With his wife, he purchased the assets of the bankrupt firm and started a ‘phoenix’ company, turning the enterprise around.
Starting a business is risky. It is estimated that between 50 and 90 per cent of the new companies that emerge each year collapse. Many more fall by the wayside while still at the business planning stage, having failed to attract start-up capital. Others make it much further down the line but never attain viability and become the ‘living dead’. When entrepreneurs fail, the consequences can be drastic, entailing not just crippling financial implications but also loss of self-esteem and, sometimes, traumatic implications for personal life – including alcoholism, depression and family break-up.
Yet many entrepreneurs who fail go on to start further businesses, only some of which succeed. How do they cope with failure, and what motivates them to pick themselves up and start afresh? Given that start-up companies are widely regarded as the engine of economic growth, and that each year a small number of new enterprises prove spectacularly successful, these are important questions.
When Dr Keith Cotterill embarked on a study of the attitudes of habitual technology entrepreneurs who had experienced at least one business failure, he opted for an in-depth approach that would add to our knowledge of how people make sense of, and respond to, the roller-coaster narratives of their careers. His research draws on data he obtained from extensive interviews with business people based in three contrasting regions – Silicon Valley in the USA, Munich in Germany, and Cambridge in the UK.
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Image: Risky business
Credit: Gavin Bell (Flickr Creative Commons)
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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