Failures may lead to ultimate success in both nature and business. Just as dynamic ecosystems depend on death to replace senescent organisms with vigorous growth, the termination of uneconomic activities is essential to wealth creation. This paper explores the benefits of failures, and uses aspects of the analogy between death and business failure to analyze how failures in business economize upon resources and lead to better firms and greater efficiencies. A distinguishing feature of our work is the analytic use of competitive markets to provide insights into the processes of success and failure. Recognizable patterns of business failures are discussed in an effort to provide entrepreneurs and mangers with a basis for understanding and acting upon changing circumstances.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Ball State University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
200402.
Length: 20 pages Date of creation: Jan 2004 Date of revision:
Jan 2005 Publication status: Published in Mid-American Journal of Business 20 no. 1 (2005): 13-20. Handle: RePEc:bsu:wpaper:200402
Philip R.P. Coelho & James E. McClure, 2005.
"Learning from Failure,"
American Journal of Business,
American Journal of Business (Formerly Named "Mid-American Journal of Business"), vol. 20(1), pages 12-20.
[Downloadable!]
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: