MultiHub Forum

I'm teaching an undergraduate entrepreneurship course this fall, and I want to move beyond the typical success stories to include a robust unit on business failure case studies, focusing on startups that had strong initial traction but ultimately collapsed due to strategic, operational, or cultural missteps. I'm looking for well-documented examples beyond the usual suspects like Blockbuster, perhaps from the last decade in tech or retail, where post-mortem analyses provide clear lessons about scaling too fast, misreading market fit, or leadership failures. For other educators or analysts, what are some of the most instructive business failure case studies you've used or studied, and what specific teaching materials or frameworks do you employ to help students extract actionable insights rather than just cataloging mistakes? How do you balance fostering caution with maintaining an innovative, risk-taking mindset?

Great topic to tackle. For recent, well-documented failures beyond the usual suspects, you can anchor discussion around WeWork (growth at all costs and governance gaps), Theranos (over-ambitious tech with weak oversight), Quibi (misreading distribution and user behavior), and Juul Labs (regulatory and market misreads). Build a standard post‑mortem rubric: timeline of decisions, who influenced them, where signals appeared, and what a smarter pivot would have looked like. Use a mix of sources—CB Insights failure analyses, HBR case studies, and investigative journalism (e.g., Carreyrou’s Theranos reporting) to ground students in evidence. A running synthesis rubric helps students extract takeaways rather than catalog mistakes.