ABSTRACT
The second half of the nineties was characterized by a boom of start-up activity in sectors making use of the Internet technology, such as electronic commerce. Many of those newly founded companies, however, later on failed and only very few succeeded in surviving the critical years of 2000 and 2001. Perhaps one merit of this mass phenomenon of disbandings might have been to contribute to a less emphatic picture of start-up firms and to make us aware of a quite usual phenomenon in emerging industries and in fields of highly innovative activity, but to a high degree dissimulated as such: the phenomenon of failure. 1 Failure as part of the innovation process has rarely been put in the center of economic or sociological analysis regarding the study of entrepreneurship and start-up firms. The theoretical approaches that took into account the role of disbandings and unsuccessful entrepreneurial activity, studying both founding and disbanding rates of populations or the role of entry and exit in industrial demography (see Aldrich 1999; Audretsch 1995), were often based on quantitative methods, mobilizing large data pools and still applied a somewhat static view.
