Addressing sustainable development and societal challenges have been placed at the heart of all government priorities, detachedly of country stage of development, as a mean to achieve prosperity through social cohesion and equality. In this setting, entrepreneurship appears to be a powerful tool to encompass economic, social, and environmental goals, particularly when sustainability oriented. Sustainability oriented entrepreneurs (henceforth SEO) are still focused in profit maximization strategies combined with environmental respect and social inclusion and rely on a firm-based entrepreneurship initiative integrating the triple bottom line. The chapter aims to understand the role of culture (culture and social norms) on SEO activity among several countries, along with gender heterogeneity. Specifically, the study determines the moderating effect of (national) culture on SEO. The study uses a logistic regression and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) database from 2015, with information of 60 countries.
Top1. Introduction
Innovation is a priority for companies and countries and both of them pursue strategies to stimulate innovative and entrepreneurial activity, since its impact on economic development and sustainable growth is widely recognized. However, being innovative is a challenge that requires the adoption of innovation practices and change of mind-set. A part from industry and business fields, innovation and entrepreneurship are also keen at country level since it contributes to achieve competitive advantage (Porter, 1990). But countries reveal diversity concerning context and practices, which could indicate that innovation is pursued differently since several factors influence the propensity to innovate and act more entrepreneurially.
Along with sustainability orientation, also gender equality is being taken at the core of private and public strategies aiming to cultivate more inclusive and innovative societies and ensure gender diversity as a mean to foster innovation and competitiveness in business (Adema et al., 2014; p.9). At least, in some developing economies, despite the attainment of opportunities parity, as showed by Parker (2009), business opportunities and entrepreneurial initiative are not wet equalized among men and women underlining the gender gap among labour market (Kelley et al., 2017). The global economic pressures are pushing countries to be strongly committed to entrepreneurship strategies to endorse employment and innovation (Ennis, 2018) but the empowerment of women is not partaking equally when compared to male counterparts. Consequently, gender challenges need to be addressed, along with other constrains towards entrepreneurial activity, as the role of context and social environment.
Although entrepreneurs starting sustainable practices have emerged some decades ago, most contributions are just conceptual and theoretical. To the best of our knowledge, the role context on entrepreneurial activity through the lens of gender hasn’t been addressed yet in prior studies.
Hence, exploring the role of context on gender and sustainability entrepreneurial orientation activity constitutes a very attractive case for three key reasons: (i) women’s entrepreneurial activity is a recent research stream, under-discussed in the academic literature moreover the specific case of SEO, (ii) the role of context towards entrepreneurial activity, especially on women’s self-employment pathways needs to be clarified along with sustainability orientation, (iii) regional policies among women entrepreneurship could be an open floor for future policy development.
In this line, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) recently launched the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor on Women’s Entrepreneurship 2016/2017 Report were female Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) was accessed through several factors. The last results surprisingly shows that among 63 economies (out of 74), the overall female Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) rates have increased by 10% and the gender gap (ratio of women to men participating in entrepreneurship) has narrowed by 5% (Kelley et al., 2017). This comes in line with previous reports, which showed an average increase in female TEA rates of 7% and a narrowing of the gender gap by 6% over the prior two-year period, revelling a positive trend on women’s entrepreneurship.
On the other hand, the GEM report of 2015, focused on entrepreneurial initiative with social and environmental purposes, due to the leading importance of this new topic, connected to the Sustainability and Cohesive Growth promoted by the OECD, the World Bank and the European Commission, offers a global perspective entrepreneurship to cohesive growth.
The study uses a logistic regression and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor – GEM – database from the year 2015, with information of 60 countries (described in the appendix – Table 1). GEM is the largest survey-based study on entrepreneurship around the world and allows an annual assessment of entrepreneurial activity phenomenon worldwide, particularly on a longitudinal perspective. The report Creating an Innovative Europe suggests “need for Europe to provide an innovation friendly market for its businesses” (Aho, Cornu, Georghiou, and Subirá, 2006) shedding the light on context’s role.