“I flunked in my first
semester.”
“Me too!”
Sounds familiar? We are
not talking about the other kind of #MeToo!
But what happened after
the first semester? Did you bounce back? Most people did.
And that’s the point.
Did we learn from our
failures in life? If we did, then we are on our way to success.
As Swami Vivekanand had said, “Take risks in
your life. If you win, you can lead. If you lose, you can guide”. We can help
others not to repeat the mistakes we did. This applies equally well to the
Startups.
As part of the core course
‘Entrepreneurship and Startup Management’
in the PGDM program being taught by me, we included the topic ‘Learning from Failures’. The course
participants had learnt all the foundation courses in Finance, Economics,
Marketing, Statistics, IT, Operations, OB, HRM, Accounting, Business Laws, BRM
etc in Semesters 1 and 2. Therefore, they were in a position to apply that
knowledge to real life situations.
To make it more experiential, we assigned one startup each to a group of students.
These startups had all been closed down or panic-sold in last twelve months.
Each group had to study and analyse the failed startup and identify the reasons
for failure. They were given 12 hours
overnight to present their findings in the class. Although the mid-semester
exams were on, the participants did a great job at researching and analysing. This
post summarises the ‘Learning from Failures’ for few of the startups studied.
Note:
Our analysis is based on information available in open domain. The purpose of
the study is for education and learning. It is not to be viewed as being judgmental.
Should any reader like to supplement it with more facts and figures, we would
be happy to update our analysis.
The above methodology
once again proves that best learning happens when we ‘learn by doing’!
Class of 2019 at VVISM
Hyderabad- keep it up.
Our earlier posts related to Startups are
listed below. Click on any link to read the full story.
Can Startup Management be Taught?
Proof of the Pudding- Inspiring Stories of Ghumakkad's Former Students-turned-entrepreneurs
Proof of the Pudding- Inspiring Stories of Ghumakkad's Former Students-turned-entrepreneurs
Fellow teachers and
startups- you are welcome to share your experiences.
Thanks for browsing.
-
Harsh-the-Ghumakkad/25th
Oct 2018
#startups #startupindia #failures #learningfromfailures #entrepreneurship #learningbydoing #ghumakkadhb #ghumakkadharsh #experiential
