Current economic situation is causing that many honest entrepreneurs see their businesses come down. Society, instead of recognizing the efforts undertaken in these cases, stigmatizes and marks them as “losers”, what causes these entrepreneurs not to try again, losing the potential of their knowhow and knowledge. The situation of “restarters” is quite similar in all EU as it is stated in the Final Report of the Expert GroupEuropean Commission: A second chance for entrepreneurs.
Some data we should have in mind is shown in the bullet points below:
- 57% would not invest money in a business managed by someone who has failed in the past
- 47% would be less inclined to order goods from someone who has already failed in business
- the broader public does not differentiate between honest failure and fraud
- the impact of the stigma of business failure: loss of business and jobs
- failed entrepreneurs often keep their entrepreneurial spirit
- re-starters often do better than first starters, although they have to overcome many obstacles (in particular in financing the restart)
- 18% of successful entrepreneurs had already run one enterprise; 6% had run two or more
It is amazing how the failure could affect us when talking about business, right?
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) was one of the first initiatives that asked items that relate to attitudes and perceptions to entrepreneurship. Now, with multiple years of data available for many countries, it is possible to not only analyze differences between countries but also to observe changes over time.
One of the key variables used by GEM is Fear of failure, which it is undertood as the attitude that would prevent you from starting a business.
We have obtained the graph comparing the indicator 'Fail to failure' in REBORN countries. Have a look to it:
There is a huge change of behaviour in a couple of REBORN territories, which are Greece and Italy. The rest keep more constant trends, some increasing, others decreasing, and some fluctuates a little bit, although in all of the cases showing very high percentage of Fear of failure among entrepreneurs, having the lowest perception of Fear to failure in Spain (38%).
REBORN project encourages you to spend some time exploring the data offered in GEM website, comparing different territories around the world based on the diferent GEM indicators, divided into:
- ENTREPRENEURIAL BEHAVIOUR AND ATTITUDES
- THE ENTREPRENEURIAL ECOSYSTEM
There is a lot to do on this regards, so let's start embracing failure to encourage entrepreneurship and competitiveness! Would you join us? =)
