Ready to fail? An exploratory study of perceptions of learning from failure of entrepreneurship education students in Ireland

Abstract

This paper explores student perceptions of learning from failure through the lens of entrepreneurial learning. Using Q-methodology, we explain how students of entrepreneurship make sense of and learn from failure. We demonstrate that individual heterogeneous experiences can be grouped and presented in a framework of five failure learning archetypes. Our research contributes to the academic discourse on entrepreneurship education by demonstrating how to address the topic of entrepreneurial failure at an intermediate level. Such knowledge allows us to bridge the gap between individual perspectives that may be difficult to address in organisational settings, such as entrepreneurship education programmes, and the societal perspectives that may be too coarse-grained to address personal aspects of learning from failure. Our study implies that entrepreneurship educators need to balance individual learning preferences, based on personality and behavioral styles, and not avoid the topic of failure.