Some new suppliers saw the opportunity to enter the energy sector as a free bet, a report into regulator Ofgem has found.
These companies could pursue a high risk, high reward model while knowing there would be little or no cost if things went wrong.
More than four million energy customers have seen their supplier go bust since August. Many saw an immediate increase in their energy bills when they were moved automatically to new suppliers.
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All energy customers are each paying about £68 extra this summer to cover the costs involved in 30 firms going bust, while one company - Bulb - has been quasi-nationalised.
It suggests that, while the supplier failures were not a failure of the regulatory regime per se, the regulator could have acted differently over time.
The report said that the pursuit of competition, and its benefits for consumers, led to Ofgem not fully analysing the risks and allowing companies to enter the market and grow without committing much of their own capital.
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This was justified largely on the grounds of increasing the degree of competition in the market, and created the opportunity for prospective suppliers to enter the market on the basis of a 'free bet', the 117-page report said.
By pursuing a high-risk, high-reward business model, such suppliers would benefit from any upside, while being able to exit at no or minimal cost if the downside materialised.
The report also raised questions about how the energy price cap was set in England, Wales and Scotland. The most recent cap added about £700 to the annual bill of a typical household.
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The report suggested that only changing the cap every six months meant companies were exposed to rising wholesale costs for a long period of time.
It also said that the cap was calibrated to deliver stretching levels of cost efficiency, meaning that it was set at too low a level and left suppliers with insufficient headroom to deal with shocks.Five years ago, Blackberry was one of the hottest technology companies around, with a market capitalisation of over $50bn, and apparently unchallenged in the business of supplying serious smartphones to serious businesses.
So what went wrong? The answer seems obvious - the iPhone arrived, and Blackberry was too slow to see what its impact would be. Mike Lazaridis was then co-CEO of Research in Motion - a slightly unlikely corporate set-up which worked very well for many years - and was asked in 2007 about the threat from Apple's phone: How much presence does Apple have in business? It's vanishingly small, was his reaction, and he was dismissive of the idea that anyone would want a phone without a keyboard.
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But he was far from alone in his complacency - there are plenty of quotes from Microsoft and Nokia executives who also failed to grasp the extent to which their world had changed.
And those far-sighted Wall Street analysts also did not spot the impending apocalypse. After all, the peak in the shares came in the summer of 2008, 18 months after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Even late in 2010, you can find references to a few analysts predicting an upturn, as Blackberry prepared to launch its tablet, the Playbook.
Back then, with the crackberry still by far the favourite tool of corporate road warriors from New York to New Delhi, the company and its supporters could have been forgiven for being fairly relaxed. After all, iPhones and Androids might be catching the eye of flighty consumers, but businesses were not going to change from their secure and reliable if slightly dull Blackberries in a hurry.
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But there was another revolution sweeping through the corporate world, with a rather unlikely battle-cry, BYOD - Bring Your Own Device. The IT managers in companies had been used to dictating to their staff exactly which computers and mobile phones they would use - and how they would use them. But people who had grown used to a more exciting mobile internet experience than a locked-down Blackberry with no apps could provide.
They demanded change and choice - and the corporate IT managers were forced to submit. Blackberry began to see its grip loosened in the law firms, the government offices and even the Wall Street banks where it once reigned supreme. Yes, there was a brief period when it was the phone of choice amongst young Britons, but that was never going to be a profitable business.
It is easy with hindsight to see where things went wrong, much harder to say what Blackberry could have done about it. After all, Blackberry's customers loved its products and most were adamant that they wanted a physical keyboard, not some flaky touch screen device. Antagonising your existing market and going off in search of different customers would always have been a very risky strategy.
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Research in Motion was one of the world's most innovative companies, its research driven by Mike Lazaridis, a man who has invested large sums of his own money in blue-skies research into theoretical physics. The Blackberry was the first device to make the internet - or at least email - truly mobile.
But that was in a world where employers decided the direction of the technology we use - now a workers' revolution has changed all that. From now on, we will decide the shape of the tools that are essential to our lives, at home and in the office. The Blackberry story is entering its final chapter - at least as a public company. The $4.7bn planned sale to its biggest shareholder means the conclusion to this sorry tale is likely to take place in private, far from the relentless gaze of the Wall Street analysts.Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggest the number of 16 to 24-year-olds having a job while studying has fallen by eight percent in the last five years.
The National Union of Students (NUS) has blamed increasing pressure on students to succeed and a lack of suitable jobs for those in full-time education for the decline.
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It's a generation of students who've been let down not just by changes in the education system, things like EMA [Education Maintenance Allowance] but also changes to the higher education system.
The Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), who have been looking into their own figures on student jobs, say the biggest fall is in the Saturday job category for teenagers, which has fallen 16% since 1997.
Spencer Thompson, an economic analyst at IPPR, says: While the era of paper-rounds, shelf-stacking and washing-up is not entirely over, fewer and fewer young people are taking on a job alongside full-time education.
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This matters because experience of paid work during study has been shown to help young people adjust to the demands and expectations of the workplace, boosting their employment chances after leaving education.
I found it was easy to get a job. I came back into my second year and applied for a job and managed to get it straight away.
Others believe the pressure to succeed at university or college, which now costs up to £9, 000 a year in England, means students want to focus more on the studies than outside work.
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I think less employers are taking on Saturday staff because of the economic downturn, relying on those who already work part time for them.
She says: People that come to uni come for a reason and if it's something like medicine you don't have time for a job or anything.
Overall, 21% of people aged 16-24 are unemployed. Meanwhile there were just over 150, 000 more students in this age group in higher education in the UK in 2012 compared to 2007.
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I think most people at uni do have jobs, but I just haven't put myself out there. I probably should this year.
According to the IPPR, 75% of young people in the UK across all levels of education do not have a job, compared to almost 60% of young people in the Netherlands who are in education and employed.
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