Wladimir Wiegel

Survival factors of newly founded firms: Theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence Wladimir Wiegel

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Business economics - Company formation, Business Plans, grade: 1,7, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: New enterprises are a source of economic growth, innovation, structural change and em-ployment. However, new firms face a serious problem of high mortality subsequent to their entry into the market. Thus the goal of this thesis paper was to identify survival factors of newly founded firms. This incorporated first to identify existing theoretical frameworks of SFR and second to provide insights into some empirical key findings for some important survival factors of newly founded businesses within the existing literature. In the core part of this paper, a crude systematization of success determinants into personal, firm-specific and environmental factors was used. The analysis of literature on firm survival and success factors revealed a mixed picture as different studies came up with contradicting results. Only few key findings were revealed to have consistent re-sults, which are further presented and discussed in this paper. Furthermore, a critical review of the success factor literature revealed also that utilization of different success measures, biased and unrepresentative samples, inappropriate analytical methods and the lack of a theory-driven approach all contribute to inconsistent results. Finally, it was also identified that the research community faces a paucity of literature in the field of regional and pre-entry determinants and how they impact on business success and survival.