Additional information is available at the end of the chapter "The first day I sold my perfumes was the best day of my life. Customers loved them. No one had ever bought such a good product at such a low price. I was overjoyed with the success, even though I worried about getting caught running my own business…In the early years, I couldn't even open my own Abstract This chapter is among the first to examine the interplay between deinstitutionalization and the rollout of novel business models by women entrepreneurs in developing countries. Much of the existing literature has examined the ways in which policy directives by formal institutions are the key drivers of entrepreneurial activity among women. Implicitly, this orientation suggests that the fate of women entrepreneurs is tied to, and cascades from, macro-level deinstitutionalization efforts, arising through changes in policies, laws and regulations championed at the highest levels. While this top-down view may intuitively be attractive, there are empirical reasons to doubt that the "institutional cascading" model accurately captures the underlying mechanisms of entrepreneurial activity among women. Taking a radically different tack, we develop and test an alternative, market-based perspective in which novel business models developed by women drive deinstitutionalization in bottom-up fashion. The context for our study involves detailed case histories of 95 women who started new businesses in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 1960-2012. Using a question-driven research design, our findings indicate that deinstitutionalization is strongly associated with the timing and substance of entrepreneurial action taken by MENA women.

In this study, we develop and empirically test the theory that new industry entrants hold advantages over incumbents in the shift from unidirectional to multi-directional revenue streams. Using a Cobb-Douglas production function, modified to isolate returns to innovation, we examine data from three distinct contexts: steamships on western rivers (1810-1860), satellite-based Internet services (1965-2010), and food waste recycling (1995-2015). The results reveal that while incumbents attempt to stretch existing technologies to fit emerging circumstances, entrepreneurial innovators achieve greater success by approaching multi-directional value creation as a distinct challenge, one requiring new technologies, organizational forms and business models. Our findings have implications for diverse multi-directional frontiers, including: social networking, commercial space travel, distance education, and medical treatments using nanoscale technologies.

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