Purpose: The main factor that contributes to the socioeconomic development of a local territory is entrepreneurship; unfortunately, start-ups in Latin America have high failure rates during the first 5 years of operation, failing to overcome the so-called valley of death. This article aims to determine how literature explains this phenomenon, mapping current knowledge and identifying gaps in the relevant literature.
Design/methodology/approach: A bibliometric analysis was carried out in order to build a state of the art starting from a search equation elaborated with the Citation Pearl Growing technique, which was entered into the SCOPUS and Web of Science (WOS) indexers, then the study of keywords co-occurrence was carried out with the VOSviewer® software, and as a result, the content analysis of 91 articles was performed with ATLAS.ti®.
Findings: The review allowed to classify three clusters: valley of death, causes of the valley of death, and how to overcome the valley of death. This article identifies and reflects on the perception of various authors.
There are still gaps in the literature and this work will allow researchers, legislators, and entrepreneurs to have an approach to information and updated scientific knowledge and to continue with its development, to identify the causes and possible ways to face this phenomenon.
Originality/value: This document offers a mapping of information and scientific knowledge related to the valley of death, referring to the early stage in which enterprises are more vulnerable and tend to fail.