Identifying the Failure Causes of Habitual Iranian Entrepreneurs: a narrative Approach

New ventures play a key role in developing innovation, employment, and increasing the competitive advantages in the country. However, the failure rate of these ventures is dramatically high; consequently, it triggers lots of economic, social, psycho-mental, and physical costs for entrepreneurs and many other societied sectors, as well. Thus, identifying the causes of these failures is of great importance. The causes of most businesses, failures are almost the same identifiable factors. In this qualitative study, we use a narrative approach by using in-depth interviews to scrutinize the career of 10 habitual entrepreneurs, who had experienced various failures. As a result, we have identified their failure causes in seven different categories as follows: lack of knowledge, experience, and entrepreneurial skills; marketing and sales challenges; partnership problems; inflexibility; financial problems; narcissism and path dependence; and finally inappropriate business environment. The most essential finding of this study is the prominent role of partnership problems and low flexibility in entrepreneurial failures.