There is a clear economic and social rationale to promoting a second chance for failed entrepreneurs. First and foremost, businesses set up by re-starters grow faster than first timers in terms of turnover and jobs created and approximately one fifth of all successful business people failed first time round. Secondly, most of the time, business failure is not due to the incompetence of the entrepreneurs. Thirdly, Europeans as a whole are relatively risk-averse, especially compared to countries such as the USA. Value of Failure seeks to kickstart the development of a comprehensive and integrated international approach to second chance entrepreneurs by constructing tailormade training and support for them and mainstreaming it across relevant stakeholders at regional level.

Creating Connections

In order to do so we will firstly create three Regional “Second Chance Entrepreneurs Alliances”. This new strategy involves bringing together stakeholders in enterprise education and economic development – such as Universities and Colleges, VET providers, Enterprise Development Agencies, Local Governments, Banks, and Chambers of Commerce – to jointly contribute to sustainable cultural and institutional change towards business failure. This will be achieved in a “top down” strategy via dialogue, exchange of best practice and construction of a common agenda for action. This type of Alliance has never been used before in Europe and once stakeholders are aware of the changes needed, they will be in a position to work together, pooling resources to make effective and cost effective improvements in services.   We will systematize the process and lessons learned in the form of a SEAL Toolkit, which will be published and actively promoted as a means of replicating the Alliances in other regions.

Starting Again

As a first concrete outcome of the collaboration espoused by the Alliance, we will then develop, test, publish and promote a dynamic “Value of Failure Enterprise” training course directly targeted at graduates and second chance entrepreneurs.

Specifically, the content of the course itself will be innovative:

• It closes the gaps between information needs and existing support infrastructures
• It is based on innovative pedagogic strategies and learning approaches such as the flipped classroom model, improved learner integration and the story-based learning approach.
• It is based on the principle of collaboration for mutual advantage
• It promotes innovation through fostering the chance of successful re-starts.