You will write an extensive research paper on an entrepreneurship failure. As you may be aware, 80% of all small businesses fail within the first five years (50% in the first year). Your research paper must answer the following question: Why does this failure happen, and how can it be avoided? You will need to research a small business or use your entrepreneur that you interviewed to learn about failure. The paper will have three sections.
- Failure Introduction: Your first 2 pages should be a background of the failed business. What was the business? Who were their competitors? What was their mission or business vision? When did the business start and then fail?
- Reason for Failure: This section (2 pages) requires your insights and will be a large part of your grade. You must describe why the business failed. There are many reasons small companies fail, and you should do some basic research (hint - some scholarly research is required here) to determine the common causes and then compare this research to your company.
- Your Analysis: The last section (2 pages) should be what could have been done, in your opinion and based on the knowledge you received in class (another hint - more scholarly research could be used here), to avert the failure. Could the entrepreneur have planned better? Was the idea sound but the implementation poor? Simply put, as the observer after the fact, how could this business have survived?
It is important: Do not write 5 pages on the company and save the last page for the reason and analysis. Please use the guidelines above to ensure that you maximize your effort on this project.
Remember, the point of this research project is for you to evaluate a failure, determine the causes of the failure, and introduce a way the failure could have been averted. This project will give you some insight for your own potential business idea and help you avoid some of the mistakes others have made. As stated above, failure is common in small business; conduct some solid research on this project to identify the risks, so you can create mitigation techniques to increase your chances of success when you venture out with your plan!
Guidelines
- Papers must be 6 - 8 pages in length. (There would be roughly one page per area included in the report.)
- You must follow APA formatting guidelines. Appropriate citations are required.
- Include a table of contents.
- Even though this is not a scientific-type writing assignment and is mostly creative in nature, references are still very important. You must have at least 4 scholarly references. (For more information, please view research information below.)
- All DeVry University policies are in effect including the plagiarism policy.
- Papers are due Week 7.
- Any questions about this paper may be discussed in the weekly Q & A discussion topic.
- This paper is worth 200 total points and will be graded on quality of research topic, quality of paper information, use of citations, grammar, and sentence structure.