Research and Case Study Seminar (Master's Seminar) in the Winter Semester 2026/27

The seminar focuses on the less visible aspects of starting a business: financial bottlenecks, failed funding rounds, high burnout rates, and resource shortages, as well as the associated personal stress experienced by founders. Using publicly available narratives of startup failures—including founder postmortems, shutdown statements, blog posts, and interviews—students examine how financial pressure and entrepreneurial failure are portrayed and what signs of stress, exhaustion, anxiety, guilt, shame, or burnout emerge.
Methodologically, students will conduct a qualitative secondary data analysis and a qualitative content analysis of a curated corpus of startup failure narratives. In doing so, they will develop their own research questions and present their findings in an academic seminar paper.
The seminar is intended for students in the master’s programs in Entrepreneurship & SME Management and Management and Markets who wish to earn a seminar certificate.