Supporting women entrepreneurship and innovation

Norrtälje is currently engaged in the Quadruple Helix initiative, EU funded project where municipalities, universities, entrepreneurs and civil society actors from Sweden, Finland and Estonia have come together to strengthen gender equality and entrepreneurship in the region. Two-year efforts to strengthen women entrepreneurs by cluster networking and increased technology skills are combined with efforts aimed at actors involved in business support, where the overall goal is to achieve non gender biased support structures.

The projects starting point is the existing gender gap with respect to new venture creation and business ownership. In Sweden for instance, 1/4 of all companies are women owned. There is a great potential in increasing the numbers of women entrepreneurs. The European Commission estimates the GDP of the EU to grow with 27% if as many women as men were business owners (Reporton equality between women and men 2010, European Commission, Directorate-General for employment, social affairs and equal opportunities, 2009).

At the same time research regarding public funding of innovation systems and clusters has exposed how industries primarily employing men have been given high priority within Sweden's innovations policy, while a group such as Service and Experience Industries, employing mostly women or both genders to the same extent, has been given a low priority (Lindberg Malin, Men and masculinities in Sweden's innovation policy, 2009).

With this background in mind the Quadruple Helix projects aims to make its contribution in unlocking potentials for growth. One way is to enhance business in sectors where many women are involved. Another is to make sure a gender perspective is vivid in all actions to promote entrepreneurship and innovation, so called gender main-streaming. Quadruple Helix makes its own investment - the Tourism Industry, creating a small scale cluster where a network of tourist entrepreneurs operating in archipelago areas in Estonia, Finland and Sweden are involved. This team of entrepreneurs works both locally and cross-borderly with capacity building and forming a functioning business network. They also take part in a pilot study of new technology, i.e. tourist services adapted to mobile phones. New mobile services and applications are developed and tested on the basis of the needs expressed by the participating tourist SME's.

The project has now come half way through and the experience so far is that the initiated cluster networking and access to technical knowledge and research can boost innovations in small women owned enterprises.