Investigating the Causes of Entrepreneurs Failure to Start-up Greenhouse Business in Isfahan Province, Iran

Despite the impact of entrepreneurships on economic development, it has not received much attention over the last few decades. Most studies in the field of entrepreneurship have been based on the experiences of successful entrepreneurs. Although the success and failure of entrepreneurs are two sides of the same coin, studying the causes of entrepreneurial failure provides us with much more important information for analyzing the entrepreneurial ecosystem in a country. Therefore, by examining the failure of entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurial ecosystem can be changed to improve the conditions for future success of entrepreneurs. The present study examines factors caused to failure start-up greenhouse business by licensed entrepreneurs in province of Isfahan located at central part of Iran. This study considers population who obtained license to start greenhouse business but failed to do so at last. This study applied qualitative research technique and related data were collected through semi-structured telephone interviews with totally 450 interviewee and 264 of them participated in the study. To analysis the collected data, the structural content analysis technique of grounded theory was applied. Due to importance of factors, vocabulary counting technique was applied. As a result, 575 Barriers are expressed by entrepreneurs. At the open coding stage, the extracted phrases are integrated in 19 terms of meaningful expressions by integrating the same items and removing repetitive cases. At the axial coding stage, 19 integrated concepts are obtained. Subsequently, the extracted phrases create six main factors. At the selective coding stage, the entrepreneurs' basic barriers are categorized into three categories: Human Barriers, Economic barriers, Infrastructure facilities and supportive policies. This study well revealed that weak infrastructure facilities, poor supportive system, economy barriers and problems with human resource barriers respectively had powerful deterrent factors which caused license holders to give up starting a greenhouse business.