Learning from Entrepreneurial Failure

Dean A. Shepherd is the David H. Jacobs Chair in Strategic Entrepreneurship at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. His research investigates both the decision-making involved in leveraging cognitive and other resources to act on opportunities, and the processes of learning from experimentation (including failure), in ways that ultimately lead to high levels of individual and organizational performance. Trenton Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Entrepreneurship Department at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management. His research interests generally focus on organizational emergence and new venture formation under resource constraints. Marcus Wolfe is an Assistant Professor of Management at the Miller College of Business at Ball State University. Prior to a career in academia, he was involved with founding and serving in senior leadership positions for a number of entrepreneurial firms. His research focuses on entrepreneurial failure, emotions, and decision-making. Holger Patzelt is the Chair of Entrepreneurship at the Technische Universität München (TUM), Germany. His research focuses on entrepreneurial decision-making and the economic, emotional and psychological consequences of failure. He currently also serves as the Vice Dean of Academic Affairs at the TUM School of Management.

• Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Grief over entrepreneurial failures; 3. Self-compassion and learning from failure; 4. Anticipatory grief, persistence, and recovery; 5. Delaying project failure as creeping death; 6. Emotional intelligence, emotional capability, and both grief recovery and sense-making; 7. Stigma over failure and impression management; 8. Narratives of entrepreneurial failure; 9. What can we do to learn more from our failure experiences?; Index.

'The authors fulfilled their goal of describing the cognitions and emotions of entrepreneurs of failed ventures. The book has value for organizational psychologists and researchers of entrepreneurship.' William Holcomb, PsycCRITIQUES