The Womenabler Blog

Google Joins the Women’s Enterprise Development Bandwagon … Cautiously

womenable — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:10:18 +0000

Large corporations are starting to trip over each other in the race to assist women entrepreneurs in developing economies (not that you’ll hear us complaining – far from it)! There’s Coke’s 5 x 20 program, Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women initiative, and Walmart’s Global Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiative.

Now jumping into the fray, with a pilot program in India, is Google. The new Women Entrepreneurs on the Web program is designed to help women business owners take their businesses online, and if it’s successful, watch for it to expand to other countries. A helping hand, or a play for global domination of the web? You decide – and keep watch for their expansion into other countries.

What are the blogmeisters saying? Read a few posts on Forbes.com, Fusible, and from Google India itself.

Find more about the program at womenentrepreneursontheweb.com or at the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, which looks to be partnering on the mentoring aspects of the effort.

Tagged: empowering women, Goldman Sachs, Google, India, The Coca-Cola Company, Walmart, women's business development, women's entrepreneurship

Women’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation

womenable — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:48:37 +0000

I’m just back from an event at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, where the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) held a series of meetings focused on innovation policy. One item on the agenda was a discussion of women’s entrepreneurship and innovation – more specifically the sharing of the results of a two-year effort studying how women and men business owners view and implement innovation in their enterprises.

The analysis is based on a 6-country survey of women and men business owners (in Brazil, Jordan, Sweden, Switzerland, Uganda and the United States), all of who own established firms with employees and with between $10,000 and $10 million USD in sales. Womenable helped to design the survey, conducted the comparative analysis, and authored the report for UNCTAD. That report has not yet been published (this meeting produced a draft report that is now out for comment among UNCTAD stakeholders – we’ll let you know when it’s publicly available), but here are some of the most intriguing findings:

Personal motivation is a key driver for innovative behavior within both women-owned and men-owned firms, but women are found to be much more likely than men to innovate in order to address a social need they see in their communities or in the marketplace;
There are more similarities than differences between women and men business owners in the operationalization of innovation within their firms, including trademarking, intellectual property protection, and investment in research and development, and in the orientation toward risk;
Differences in risk tolerance are much more likely to be seen by development context than gender, with owners in the developing economies studied being much more cautious about risk;
Access to finance is the most important barrier to innovation in all countries and among both women and men, but cultural constraints are an additional constraint – not only to innovation but to business growth in general – for women in Jordan and Uganda.

When it’s published, you’ll see that the report contains an extensive series of recommendations for policy and programmatic action, including:

consideration of innovation-focused business exchange programs (regional, national or international) – as well as greater gender diversity in the composition of trade fairs and trade missions;
establishment of targeted training and technical assistance to encourage innovation in social enterprises; and
the creation of mentoring and role model efforts aimed at increasing innovation among women business owners.

The report also contains an extensive bibliography of related research and links to organizations and web sites related to women’s entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as summaries of each of the six country-specific reports.

To download and review the PowerPoint presentation I gave at the UNCTAD meeting, CLICK HERE. For more information about the full event agenda, CLICK HERE. And here’s a link to another interesting UNCTAD report, Applying a Gender Lens to Science, Technology and Innovation.

Tagged: innovation, UNCTAD, women's empowerment, women's entrepreneurship, Womenable

Federal Contracts Requiring Larger Investment for Small Businesses

womenable — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:08:59 +0000

A new survey conducted among small business owners who are active federal government contractors finds that their investment of time and money seeking contracting opportunities has increased by 21% over the past year, as federal contract spending has declined 12%.

This and other facts come from Trends in Federal Contracting for Small Businesses, a new report authored by Womenable from a survey conducted by us for American Express OPEN’s Victory in Procurement for Small Business program.

The survey was conducted online in October 2011 among small business owners who are registered on the Central Contractor Registry (CCR) and are either currently performing on a federal contract (prime or subcontractor) or who have done so within the past five years.

Other findings from this first of four reports drawn from the survey include:

On average, active contractors invested $103,827 in time and money last year seeking federal contracts, up from $86,124 in 2009;
Larger firms invest more seeking contracting opportunities, but so do firms owned by persons of color. Women invest somewhat less time and money seeking federal contracting opportunities than do their male counterparts;
On average, small firms submitted an average of 4.4 bids before they won their very first federal contract – the lesson being, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again;
Over the long term, experience pays off. Average bidding success rates – 38% overall – are significantly higher among firms with 10+ years of contracting experience compared to those firms with three years or less contracting experience.

The other three reports will focus on special trends among women and minority business owners, how strategies and outcomes change with level of procurement experience, and what lessons can be learned from firms that focus on subcontracting as a procurement strategy.

To learn more and download a copy of the report, read this Womenable-authored blogpost on openforum.com. Look for the next report from this survey in about a month; it will focus on the key findings among women and minority business owners.

Tagged: American Express OPEN, business, federal procurement, women's business development, Womenable

Pearls from New GEM Women’s Report

womenable — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 19:40:28 +0000

A new report on trends in women’s entrepreneurship, drawing on the multi-country Global Entrepreneurship Monitor surveys, has just been published by a team of researchers from Babson College. The GEM 2010 Women’s Report draws on data collected from surveys of over 175,000 adults in 59 countries, including 14,000 women business owners.

As in previous GEM women’s reports, the researchers point to a continuing gap in entrepreneurial activity among women compared to men, lower levels of self-confidence among women, and lower levels of growth aspirations among women business owners compared to their male counterparts.

The 59 economies are grouped into three categories (newly-named as of the 2008 GEM study and roughly equivalent to the previous low, moderate, and high income definitions): factor-driven, efficiency-driven, and innovation-driven. However, these categorizations do not seem to impact the gender analysis on many of the key findings:

women are found to have smaller, less diverse professional networks than men,
in all but one country (Ghana!), women are less likely than men to own businesses, and
while internationalization increases with economic development, in all three types of economies women are less likely to trade internationally than men.

One intriguing new analysis contained in this report is a look at entrepreneurship gender gaps over time in the 16 countries that have been included in the GEM consortium for most of the past nine years. It was found that the gender gaps in entrepreneurship rates that had been quite wide in Argentina and Brazil as of 2002 have now virtually disappeared, while – conversely – in China where there had previously been no gender gap in entrepreneurship rates there is now a significant gap, with women now being much less likely than men to own a business.

For more information about the report, and to download a free copy of the 56-page report, CLICK HERE, and for a listing of all five GEM women’s reports published since 2004, CLICK HERE.

Tagged: Babson College, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, statistics, women's business development, women's enterprise, women's entrepreneurship, women-owned business

Top Ten Womenabling Events of 2011

womenable — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:56:51 +0000

What events, trends and research reports top our list of the most important of the year? Look no further than Womenable’s most recent quarterly e-newsletter for our insights. Some of the items making it onto our Top Ten list include:

the centenary of International Women’s Day
the World Bank’s most recent World Development Report, focusing on gender and development, and
a welcome upwelling of conversations about growth – not only bemoaning the lack of women at the top (so what else is new?) but finally taking aim at some of the structural barriers impeding their progress.

CLICK HERE to read the full list. Happy holidays and best wishes for a womenabling 2012!

(And, if you liked that e-newsletter and would like to subscribe to our quarterly e-news digest, please CLICK HERE to subscribe!)

Tagged: Julie Weeks, top ten list, women's entrepreneurship, Womenable