Gender and Performance: Preliminary Evidences from Italian Innovative SMEs

Entrepreneurship and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) play a pivotal role for the socio-economic development worldwide. They are, indeed, recognised as important economic drivers as their activities can boost economic growth in various ways, such as being source of employment, promoting equality among socioeconomic and demographic groups, and fostering the development of new goods and services (e.g. Audretsch, 2012). In line with this, SMEs contribution to innovation has been extensively investigated by researchers and policy makers (e.g. Acs and Audretsch, 1988; Rosenbusch et al., 2011). European Union, for example, has developed numerous programmes to foster innovation in and by SMEs, even identifying, categorizing and periodically analysing the so called “innovative SMEs”. However, very scant is the attention, at the international level, devoted to the analysis of the role of gender in innovation per se and in innovative SMEs. This paper fits into this underinvestigated stream of research by specifically analysing the impact, if any, of gender on Italian innovative SMEs’ performance.