Title: Looking back: a retrospective narrative analysis of entrepreneurs' failure experiences

Authors: Marcus I. Crews

Addresses: Department of Management, College of Business Administration, Loyola Marymount University, 1 LMU Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA

Abstract: While failed ventures are reported as the most likely outcome of an attempt to create a new venture, there is a relative lack of research examining the failure experience from the entrepreneur's perspective. Using narrative analysis to examine entrepreneurs' first-person accounts of past failures, we find entrepreneurs attend to gains and losses within and across financial, operational, psychological, social, and environmental dimensions of performance when reflecting on a venture experience. In addition, structural analysis of entrepreneurial failure narratives reveals narrative arc differences in information disclosure (staging), story advancement (plot progression), and emergence and resolution of conflict (cognitive tension) that vary by type of failure an entrepreneur experiences. The present study contributes to the entrepreneurial failure and cognition literatures by identifying the content of entrepreneurs' personal frameworks for performance assessment and showing patterns in the psychological processing of varied forms of entrepreneurial failure. The study concludes with suggestions for future research.

Keywords: entrepreneurial failure; public failure narratives; subjective failure criteria; mental accounting.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEV.2025.151017

International Journal of Entrepreneurial Venturing, 2025 Vol.17 No.2, pp.149 - 193

Received: 27 May 2024
Accepted: 07 Mar 2025
Published online: 09 Jan 2026 *

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