Women Entrepreneurs in A Gendered World Does Incubation Help Overcome their Social Network Challenges

Abstract

This dissertation investigates whether incubators help women entrepreneurs in overcoming their impoverished social networks to effectively perform their entrepreneurial functions. I look at various dimensions of social networks, which have been identified in extant literature on social networks namely network size, network density, network diversity, centrality in network and strength of ties. Also, I identify and investigate into three key entrepreneurial functions that have featured in the debates in economics and entrepreneurship literatures on key entrepreneurial functions that entrepreneurs perform, namely opportunity recognition, resource mobilization and innovation. Further, I explore women entrepreneurship in the context of an emerging economy, India. The context of emerging economy is important to women entrepreneurship as institutions of any context have a significant impact on entrepreneurship. I explore how these institutions affect women and whether they impact their social networks and/or the entrepreneurial functions that they perform. I also look at incubators as a mechanism of intervention to explore whether and how they are able to affect social networks and entrepreneurial functions. Even incubators perform significantly different activities in an emerging economy than those that they perform in their more industrialized economies. I explore how they do so in my dissertation. I examine this in three essays. My first essay compares social network dimensions of incubated and non-incubated women entrepreneurs to examine if there are significant differences between them. My second essay primarily focuses on entrepreneurial functions of incubated men and women entrepreneurs and non-incubated women entrepreneurs to understand differences between these three groups and explore relationships between the three entrepreneurial functions to observe how incubators influence these relationships. My third essay examines the influence of social network dimensions on entrepreneurial functions.