Abstract:

Most of new start-ups will not succeed producing debts for investors, business partners, employees and also for the state itself. One of the most important causes is lack of knowledge about what is and what is not important when assessing a business plan. These knowledge are generally presumed to be learnt by doing and we expected that managers with more experience are better informed about predictive validity of some business characteristic like price, completion and 23 others, which directly affect the final success or failure. National cultures are also important and differences between Slovakian (n = 51) and Ukrainian (n = 52) managers and administrative workers were assumed. We found out that although these groups differ in their view what is important (individual business characteristics), they did not much differ in final assessment of start-up future prospects, which was poor for Slovakians and Ukrainians either. Learning by doing in starting up new business is difficult, because complex environment and positive effect could be seen only after at least four starts-up. Our findings are similar to Toft – Kehler et al. (2014) large scale study.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurship, start up, learing by doing, experience.