Identifying Factors Affecting Startups Survival: A Systematic Literature Review

One of the most valid definitions for the concept of "survival" is the possibility of paying salaries and wages to the startup's employees and owners for at least 42 months. Given that the highest failure rate of businesses is in the early years paying attention to the factors affecting new firms' performance processes will reduce their failure rate, leading to success, growth and sustainability. This article, reviews and analyzes all the articles in the Scopus database that are related to the survival of firms in terms of their number over time, the most common keywords, authors, journals, and countries publishing these articles, bibliometric method, and VOSviewer software are used. In the following, the factors that have been emphasized and repeated in the literature have been identified with a systematic literature review and meta-synthesis method. In the bibliometric section, 1959 articles have been analyzed and in the meta-synthesis review section, 85 articles have deeply been studied. Based on the findings of the research, 32 main factors affect the survival of businesses, which are categorized into five general categories including individual, organizational, supporters, financial, and environmental factors, and presented in a conceptual framework model.