Entrepreneurs’ Learning from Business Failures : An Emerging Market Perspective

This paper extends prior scholarly works on entrepreneurial failure, entrepreneurial resilience and learning from failure by examining how the effects of prior experiences of entrepreneurial business failure (EBF) manifest in the entrepreneurial process of subsequent venture formation. We elucidate the pre-founding and post-founding effects of prior EBF via insights drawn from 25 serial entrepreneurs in Nigeria. The findings demonstrate that entrepreneurs were often motivated to start another venture as a result of the economic hardship and social stigmatization that occurs after business closure. We identified a three-stage fine-grained process perspective of successive entrepreneurial engagement (e.g. pre-founding, formation and development, and post-founding conditions and effects on subsequent entrepreneurial ventures). These stages shed light on entrepreneurial fragility, entrepreneurial resiliency and the development of anti-fragility capabilities that are conducive to subsequent venture formation and survival. We shed light on how individual-level factors shape how prior failure experiences can shift from liability immediately after business collapse and at pre-founding to become an asset during and after new-venture formation. Such learning from past failure is vital in adapting to dynamic environmental changes, especially those observed in emerging-market settings. Taken together, we demonstrate how entrepreneurs bounce back from errors, failures and setbacks.