But why do so many end disappointingly? Entrepreneurial management. Why Start-ups Fail. From the Magazine MayโJune 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: Bad bedfellows. Quincy Apparel, for instance, was undone by weak support from its investors and factory partners and inflexible employees. False starts. 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.
Read more on Entrepreneurial management or related topics Entrepreneurship , Start-ups and Business failures.
