The heterogeneous landscape of innovation in female led-businesses – cross-country comparisons

Female led-businesses are nowadays regarded as a vehicle for worldwide economic and social wellbeing. Seen as a mechanism for better social inclusion, empowerment, wide institutional change and local economic development, female entrepreneurship has been the focus of many scholarly pursuits. However, one field in which the interest in female-led businesses has been somewhat overlooked and overshadowed by other topics is the field of innovation studies. There are various national and international programs meant to increase the level of innovativeness of female-led businesses and there are reports presenting somewhat contradictory results in which women business owners are portrayed either as more innovative or at a disadvantage when it comes to the resources needed for innovation in comparison to their male counterparts. Thus, this study seeks to disentangle the various aspects which affect the landscape of innovation in female led-businesses by focusing on the way in which the national contexts creates opportunities or barriers for innovation. Based on the qualitative data provided by the GEM 2012 Adult Population Survey, we show that, in the case of the six countries included in the sample, the landscape is highly heterogeneous and that macrolevel indicators such as percentage of female entrepreneurs, public support for high growth female entrepreneurship and gender equality are not capable of fully explaining the innovation behavior of female-led businesses. The results presented here contribute to advancing the research on innovation and female entrepreneurship by opening up new avenues for research which will renounce the paradigm of an ideal type of female-led business, and start to seriously take into consideration the heterogeneity of these businesses and of the landscapes in which they operate.