Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds of founders and investors and scores of accounts of entrepreneurial setbacks, his findings buck the conventional wisdom that the cause of start-up failure is either the founding team or the business idea.
The author found six patterns that doomed ventures. Two were especially common:. Quincy Apparel, for instance, was undone by weak support from its investors and factory partners and inflexible employees. Many overlook a crucial step in the lean start-up process: researching customer needs before testing products. The good news is, firms can avoid that pitfall by rigorously defining the problem they want to solve, getting one-on-one feedback from potential customers, and validating concepts with real customers in real-world settings.
An examination of start-up failures revealed two common mistakes by founders: failing to engage the right stakeholders, and rushing into an opportunity without testing the waters first. Founders should take conventional entrepreneurial advice with a grain of salt, because it often backfires.
They also should find the right investors and management team and avoid giving short shrift to customer interviews and research. But why do so many end disappointingly? Entrepreneurial management. Why Start-ups Fail. Two were especially common: Bad bedfellows. False starts. The Autopsy An examination of start-up failures revealed two common mistakes by founders: failing to engage the right stakeholders, and rushing into an opportunity without testing the waters first.
The Remedy Founders should take conventional entrepreneurial advice with a grain of salt, because it often backfires. Read more on Entrepreneurial management or related topics Entrepreneurship , Start-ups and Business failures. Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Partner Center.
