This blog was kindly contributed by Dr Adam Shore, Director of the School of Business and Management at Liverpool John Moores University, Chair of the Chartered Association of Business Schools’ Learning, Teaching and Student Experience Committee, and Board Director of the National Centre for Entrepreneurship in Education (NCEE). This blog is the sixth in our series on leadership in partnership with NCEE.
Failure isn’t something you often hear discussed within the corridors of higher education institutions. Yet critical setbacks and failures are ubiquitous, from programmes failing to recruit sufficient numbers of students to projects either not achieving their outputs or else failing to secure sufficient financial support. Institutions, however, can be debilitatingly slow to see failure and assess its cost. Indecision and individual pride lead to the slow death of projects or programmes. Things are not too different in the entrepreneurial world. Failing projects and businesses elicit negative emotional responses that affect the health, wellbeing and performance of employees, and there are perhaps lessons to be learnt for higher education institutions from the field of entrepreneurial failure.
