ENTREPRENEUR’S GENDER AND FIRM INNOVATION BREADTH: AN INSTITUTION-BASED VIEW OF SMEs IN AN EMERGING MARKET CONTEXT

Abstract

This study, at the intersection of gender, entrepreneurship and innovation, investigates the impact of women leadership (vis-a-vis men) on innovation by SMEs in an emerging economy context. Drawing from the institution-based view, we examine the moderating role of regional formal institutions and informal gender norms on the innovativeness of women-led SMEs in India. Using data obtained from the World Bank Enterprise Survey and World Value Survey, and deploying the Poisson regression method, we find that, overall, women-led SMEs perform better than men-led SMEs in innovation breadth. Interestingly, the regional formal institutional quality negatively moderates the relationship between having a female entrepreneur and firm innovation breadth. In addition, regional gender role expectations act as a positive moderator between having a female entrepreneur and firm innovation breadth. Further, the increase in innovation breadth under unfavourable formal institutional quality and informal gender norms is larger for non-technological innovation than for technological innovation.

Gender and firm innovation - A systematic literature review and future research agenda

“…et al , 2019). Though qualitative studies present a good description of the context in their study (Kothari, 2017; Zapalska et al , 2015), the use of culture or institutional explanations in quantitative studies are rarely region-specific, but for a few exceptions shown by Reutzel et al (2018), T.M. et al (2019) and Strohmeyer et al (2017).…”

“…On the other hand, some studies studied individual entrepreneurs. While studies such as Strohmeyer et al (2017) and Link and van Hasselt (2019) show a negative relationship between gender of the entrepreneur and innovation, studies such as Farooq et al (2019) andT.M. et al (2019) show that the gender of the entrepreneur has a positive influence on innovation.…”

“…Lee et al (2016) and Rodrigues Alves et al (2017) show how women in developing countries gain higher export performance by increasing innovation as compared to women entrepreneurs in developed countries. T.M. et al (2019) studied Indian entrepreneurs to show that regional institutions and subcultures have a significant relationship with firm innovation.…”

“…That is, all of the above studies try to establish discrimination of the women entrepreneurs to explain the difference in performance. However, two of the studies on Indian entrepreneurs show a positive influence on innovation performance (Farooq et al , 2019; T.M. et al , 2019) whereas one shows a negative influence due to institutional factors (Reutzel et al , 2018).…”

“…Research avenue 2: the importance of context Though empirical studies are plentiful in the area, results often vary by the geographical location of the study. The results are largely context-specific and are influenced by regional institutions and cultures (Fern andez, 2015;Kothari, 2017;Østergaard et al, 2011;T.M. et al, 2019).…”