Female entrepreneurship and innovation management

ABSTRACT

In Brazil, 43% of business owners in the country are female, and 57% are male. Of the total companies active in Brazil, 30% have women as partners. In addition, of the total number of women entrepreneurs in Brazil, 73% are partners in micro or small companies. The percentage rises to 98.5% when companies of the Micro Individual Entrepreneur (MEI) type are also accounted for. More than 1.3 million Brazilian women are members of MEI. In this context of changes in the gender equality process, this article aims to analyze the innovation status of women entrepreneurs in the macroregion of Jundiaí. The methodology involves bibliographical and documental research, to identify the profile of the female entrepreneur and raise the numbers of female entrepreneurship in Brazil and in the world. Finally, a field survey, through the application of the innovation radar in companies in the macro-region of Jundiaí, in order to raise the results obtained through innovative actions applied by companies run by men and women. The results confirmed the hypothesis raised, that women have a more innovative profile than men, in addition to demonstrating a more assertive capacity for the entrepreneurial management of a business.

KEYWORDS: #Femaleentrepreneurship. #Genderequality. #Innovationmanagement.

INTRODUCTION

With each passing day, women are gaining more and more strength in spaces that until recently were dominated by the male universe: politics, economy, health, culture, media, arts, and, of course, the corporate world.

According to data published by the Servi?o Brasileiro de Apoio às Micro e Pequenas Empresas de S?o Paulo (SEBRAE/SP, 2017), in 2000 women represented 28.4% of the business community in S?o Paulo. In 2010, they leaped to 34.9% of entrepreneurs in the state.

A study by Serasa Experian (2015) reveals that Brazil has 5,693,694 entrepreneurial women, representing 8% of the country's female population. That means that 43% of business owners in the country are female, and 57% are men. Of the total companies active in Brazil, 30% have women as partners.

Still according to this research (SERASA EXPERIAN, 2015), of the total entrepreneurs in Brazil, 73% are members of micro or small companies. The percentage rises to 98.5% when companies of the type Individual Micro Entrepreneur (MEI). More than 1.3 million Brazilian women are MEI members.

Large corporations such as Coca-Cola, eBay, Walmart, and Dell, among many others, recently announced goals to increase the participation of women in their leader board and are working hard on it, understanding that this action favors the health and profitability of the company, according to a report by Revista HSM Management (BARSH, 2015).

In this context of changes in the gender equality process, this article aims to analyze the innovation status of women entrepreneurs in the macro-region of Jundiaí based on the hypothesis that women are more innovative in conducting their business than men by the intrinsic characteristics of the female gender.

To achieve this objective, the methodology involves bibliographical research in specific literature on the subject and innovation management, in books and scientific articles. In addition, documentary research on data published in magazines and periodicals in general, as well as by highly reliable organizations of your information, to identify the profile of the entrepreneurial woman and raise the numbers of female entrepreneurship in Brazil and in the world. Finally, a search field, through the application of the innovation radar in companies in the macro-region of Jundiaí, in order to raise the results obtained through the innovative actions applied by companies run by men and women.

2. DEVELOPMENT

2.1 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1.1 FEMALE ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Several international treaties bring in their content as a basis of human rights and gender equality, in particular the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDCM), adopted in 1979 and cited by Ruggie (2014) as the determining factor for human rights treaties of United Nations Organization began to focus more directly on the companies.

Currently, of the 17 (seventeen) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations in Brazil (ONU BR, 2016, online), goal number 5 (five) is “to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”. Among the SDG targets to achieve this goal is “the full and effective participation of women and equal leadership opportunities". According to the Glossary of Development Goal Terms Sustainable 5 (ONU BR, 2015, p. 19), “occupying decision-making spaces and participating actively in public life is also related to equality of opportunities in the environment of public and private companies to reach positions of leadership and high executive level”.

This theme is gaining an increasing proportion of the media, including with the production of works such as the one by Irigaray (2017) entitled “This sex that is not only one sex”, elaborated to stimulate the debate about the female identity and the presence of women in society; as well as that of Neder (2015), “The seven-year revolution women", which addresses the reinvention of female aging and seeks to create a new model of maturity for women over 50.

Stereotypy has been a recurring theme in debates about gender equality. Mullins (2004) addresses a series of reports from the hospitality industry that revealed that women predominantly perform operational activities part-time and who do not perform administrative functions in hotels. Furthermore, the author alleges that sexual segregation is evident in the different sectors of the hotel: the kitchens are almost exclusively male and room service is a female job. Veja Magazine (MONTEIRO, 2017) reports about companies from the digital world that replicate the old prejudice against women in their corporate environment, showing that changes are starting in a segment that has always been considered as recognizably masculine.

However, this scenario of inequality is changing. In addition to society's growing demand for companies accused of discrimination against female employees, with examples such as Google, JP Morgan, Facebook, and Xerox (MANO; SCHERER, 2017), statistics are proving that a higher diverse gender at the top of a company tends to improve its health and profitability.

A publication by Endeavor Brasil (2016) lists the obstacles that still exist for women to grow in business: uneven foreign investment, discouragement in the business world, unequal education, and sexism. To change this scenario, actions such as the creation of the Entrepreneurial Woman Network (CRUZ, 2017) are reproducing exponentially.

On the other hand, according to McKinsey consulting data published in a report by Exame Magazine (MANO; SCHERER, 2017, online), in companies with gender diversity in management, the financial result is 15% higher than the average of its direct competitors. When there is also ethnic diversity in the leadership, the results are 35% higher. The appeal extends to the global economy. According to the same study, in a scenario in which all countries reached gender equalization, 28 trillion dollars would be added to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2025. Among the characteristics that HSM Management Magazine (BARSH, 2017) lists as key differentials of women are the ability to bring creativity and innovation to the company.

2.1.2 INNOVATION MANAGEMENT AND THE ALI PROGRAM

Innovation is a word that, if misused, is emptied of content and becomes just a commonplace in a pseudo-marketing speech. According to Gibson and Skarzynski (2008, p. 4), “In general, innovation becomes another jargon word of the corporate motto – the new management fad – that receives rhetorical reverence on meetings, publicity campaigns, and annual companies reports”, but whose challenge is to identify “how to transform all this rhetoric into a lasting and profitable”. And Gruver et al. (2009, online) “Innovation is a messy process - hard to measure and hard to administer”. Trías de Bes and Kotler (2011, p. 15) claim that “innovation, as a discipline, has not reached the stage of development capable of satisfying the pressing need to innovate”.

For this reason, it is important to be careful when using the term innovation adequately and containing the repertoire it involves, as the definition by Geoff Nicholson, former vice president of 3M and creator of Post-it?, quoted by Barkham (2010, online): “Research is the transformation of money into knowledge. Innovation is the transformation of knowledge into money”, or even an extension of Cruz (2011, p. 19) “an invention only becomes an innovation when it is taken off the shelf and placed in the market – when it starts to give financial return to someone or some company”.

According to Drucker (2016, p. 39), innovation “creates a resource”, after all, “there is no such thing as a 'resource' until man finds a use for something in nature and thus the economic value endowment”.

An important reference on the subject, the Oslo Manual (OECD, 2005) says that Innovation can be carried out in basically four areas of a company: product, process, organization, and marketing. For something to be considered innovative, it does not necessarily have to be new, it can just be something that has been significantly improved in that company.

Precisely because of the infinite range of possibilities to analyze innovation management in companies of all segments and under different aspects, it is adopted for this article as a reference, the Innovation Radar, methodology created by Sawhney, Wolcott, and Arroniz (2006), revised by Bachmann and Destefani (2008) and adapted to the Local Innovation Agents Program in the Innovation Guide prepared by Bachmann (SEBRAE/PR, 2015).

“The Innovation Radar establishes information oriented to the practice of innovating, above all, seeks exact scores in an overview at the time the company is innovating or not” (RODRIGUES; CARVALHO, 2012, p. 319). According to the Innovation Guide (SEBRAE/PR, 2015, p. 29), the Innovation Radar brings together 04 (four) main dimensions:

1. The offers created;

2. The customers served;

3. The processes employed;

4. The places of presence used.

Still, according to the Guide, these unfold in 08 (eight) dimensions, which together with the thematic set innovation environment make up the 13 (thirteen) dimensions included in the Innovation Radar, namely: Offer, Platform, Brand, Customers, Solutions, Relationship, Added Value, Processes, Organization, Supply Chain Suppliers, Presence, Network, and Innovative Ambience. For this study, only the degree of global innovation will be analyzed, which is a sum of all dimensions of the Radar and represents in a more specific way the innovation culture of the companies researched.

It will also be analyzed the note attributed to business management, which configures the initial diagnosis that the Local Innovation Agent makes of the company added to the process of evolution in this regard throughout the entire Program. After all, for the culture of innovation to establish itself in a company, some essential elements are needed: internalization of the innovation culture; people with a predisposition to be innovative; organizational support and incentive infrastructure; and a process systematized (methodology), which helps the transformation of ideas into results for the company (CARVALHO et al., 2015). The idea here is to prove that companies run by women seek to structure themselves based on these pillars.

2.2 METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURES

Based on the results of the bibliographical and documentary research above described that maintained the hypothesis raised in the Introduction, the next step was to carry out a field survey, through the analysis of the response of 15 (fifteen) agents from the Jundiaí macro-region to a question: “Which are the [oriented] companies where the manager is a woman? (who makes the decisions of the company)”.

Of the total of 513 companies assisted by the ALI Program in the Jundiaí region, only 177 companies are managed by women, corresponding to 34.5% of the total. It is worth noting the fact that the number is very similar to the percentage of S?o Paulo state, which proves the fact that this is characteristic of the region where locates Jundiaí city.

2.3 PRESENTATION, ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION OF THE RESULTS

The Local Innovation Agents Program (ALI) is the result of a partnership between Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) and Servi?o Brasileiro de Apoio às Micro e Pequenas Empresas (SEBRAE), according to which the proposal is to spread the innovation culture among micro and small companies throughout national territory. According to the prerogatives of the Program, are selected and trained by SEBRAE an average of 20 (twenty) university graduates for each region, who become Local Innovation Agents and CNPq scholarship holders, to guide and monitor an average of 40 (forty) micro and small companies in the management process business and innovation management during the period of 30 (thirty) months, starting in June/2015 and ending in November/2017.

The analysis proposed in this article resides in the hypothesis that women have a more innovative profile than men, due to the various characteristics intrinsic to the female gender. For this purpose, the scores of companies were analyzed managed exclusively by women compared to companies managed exclusively by men, as a sample of the total number of companies in the Jundiaí macro-region.

Of the total of 513 companies assisted by the ALI Program in the Jundiaí region, only 177 companies are managed by women, corresponding to 34.5% of the total. For this study, a sample of 40 (forty) companies was served, managed by women, and the same number of companies managed by men for comparison. Regarding the grades awarded by SistemAli (an information system that stores all data of registered companies) about business management, which assigns a percentage score of up to 100% per company, the percentage of companies governed by women was 44.98% and by companies managed by men, it was 40.90%. The global average, which corresponds to the sum of all dimensions of the Innovation Radar, was 3.04 for women and 2.95 for men.

Despite representing only a small sample, which would configure an absolute certainty about the results obtained, such numbers already bring an indication that the hypothesis that women have more innovative characteristics remains, at least in principle, proven. Furthermore, the results demonstrated a more assertive capacity for business management of a business on the part of women to the detriment of companies managed exclusively by men.

2.4 ALI LEARNING AS A RESEARCHER

The orientation process of the Local Innovation Agents, the exchanges of experiences between advisors, and the process of leading the state management team of S?o Paulo were essential for learning beyond any possible expectation that there was about the ALI Program.

It is important to point out that there was one item in particular that provoked a very fruitful personal reflection: during the orientation process of the Local Agents of Innovation, all brought great results from small innovation actions. A reflection that this information provoked is that innovation brings in itself the idea of simplicity: small actions can provide great results, as long as correctly implemented and with the commitment of the team involved in the process.

3. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

The guiding objective of the present work resided in the identification and analysis of the innovation status of women entrepreneurs in the Jundiaí macro-region from the hypothesis that women have a more innovative profile in conducting their business than men due to the intrinsic characteristics of the female gender.

To achieve this objective, bibliographical research was first carried out for the construction of the literature review, as well as documentary research, in which a very innovative profile of women, in general, has been proven.

Nevertheless, a survey of the definitions adopted by the ALI Program, as well as for this article, about innovation management and all terms that follow this one.

Finally, field research proved that, for female entrepreneurs in the Jundiaí macro-region, the innovation status of the businesswoman is superior to the male entrepreneur. And there is also a highlight about business management, which presented better results among the female audience as well.

Changes in society are inevitable, they are part of the cycle that every society is currently experiencing. The important thing to look at is how to position yourself most assertively, not to face these changes, but to adapt to them and strategically position yourself for what the future holds.

THANKS

First, a specific thank you to Servi?o Brasileiro de Apoio às Micro e Pequenas Empresas (SEBRAE) and Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) for the learning opportunity offered to all advisors of the Local Innovation Agents Program. Such an initiative is fundamental for the promotion of innovation research in the country and demonstrates an interested public in the development of actions aimed at the management of national knowledge.

Here a special thanks to the attention and affection given by the team manager of S?o Paulo state (regional coordination), in the persons of Mr. Andre Lazcano da Luz and Mrs. Maria Roseli Moreira Lino Ferreira; as well as the management team from the region of Jundiaí, highlighting Mrs. Alessandra Consoline Dalforno and Raquel Frollini Zabotto Chiusoli. Far beyond professionalism, empathy was a striking characteristic of all the people described, through respect, patience, and understanding. And I thank the Local Innovation Agents, for the responsibility and dedication in the development of all the activities of the Program.

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