Grow fast, fail slowly: Un trepreneurial ecosystems and the fast failure paradox
研究阿姆斯特丹创业生态系统中社会、经济和文化动态如何影响创业者终止不成功企业的决策，发现利益相关者的实践反而延长了失败过程，揭示了生态系统主要服务于利益相关者而非创业者的本质。
“Failing fast” features prominently in entrepreneurship discourse as a mechanism for reallocating resources and strengthening ecosystem resilience. However, existing research has yet to explain how entrepreneurs decide when to terminate an unviable venture, as failure studies remain focused on individual biases, while ecosystem studies largely overlook the early failure phase. Addressing this gap, this study examines how social, economic, and cultural dynamics within Amsterdam’s entrepreneurial ecosystem shape entrepreneurs’ decisions to discontinue their ventures. While stakeholders adopt a fast-failure rhetoric and entrepreneur-centred support framing to maintain legitimacy, their practices are driven by diverse institutional interests, thereby creating conditions that prolong failing ventures rather than enabling timely exit. These insights shift the locus of entrepreneurial failure from individual decision-making to systemic conditions and challenge the dominant view of ecosystems as entrepreneur-centric, showing instead that they primarily serve stakeholder interests, rendering them in effect Un trepreneurial ecosystems.