Daniel Blaseg and Armin Schwienbacher win Best Entrepreneurship Research Award 2018
"The Fallacy Problem of Entrepreneurs"
In October 2018, Daniel Blaseg and his co-author Armin Schwienbacher were awarded the prestigious KSG Best Entrepreneurship Research Award 2018 for their work "The Fallacy Problem of Entrepreneurs" at the 22nd Annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Entrepreneurship, Innovation and SMEs (G-Forum) in Stuttgart, one of the largest conferences on entrepreneurship in Europe. The prize, endowed with 2,000 euros and divided this year, is provided by the Karl Schlecht Foundation.
In this research paper, Daniel Blaseg and Armin Schwienbacher examine to what extent the provision of results from historical and comparable projects can influence the subjective success assessment of founders. The results show that prospective founders systematically overestimate the likelihood of success of their campaign by around 40%. Founders do not adjust their assessment to the historically lower results, but keep their optimistic assessment or even increase it. This overestimation of likelihood has economic consequences and over-optimistic founders not only put their plans into practice more often, but also fail more often. The mere provision of the results of comparable campaigns is therefore not an effective method to support founders in planning a realistic scenario of their project.