ULSTER UNIVERSITY BUSINESS SCHOOL ROUND TABLE
SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE a UU Round Table on Women ’ s Entrepreneurship
Held in conjunction with a visit to Belfast by Professor Barbara Orser from the University of Ottawa - an advisor to the Canadian Government and author of Feminine Capital . Unlocking the Power of Women Entrepreneurs - the Ulster University Round Table brought together Northern Ireland ’ s leading commentators on women ’ s entrepreneurship .
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ntroducing the Round Table , Professor Orser said that regardless of country , in an innovation driven economy the same issues exist around the development of women ’ s entrepreneurship : access to capital , ICT , marketing , and partnerships . The lack of gender desegregated data , and the need for a public policy framework that includes the integration of women ’ s enterprise .
However , when there is an infrastructure in place , as there is in Canada with government funded women ’ s enterprise centres , the job generation successes are comensurate with the best results in any other initiative .
As a result , the conversation has evolved from startup to scaleup with copious amounts of information and infrastructure in place for startup , but less so for scaleup .
Citing the Canadian response , Prof Orser referred to the recently launched Inclusive Innovation Agenda , a six point plan which acknowledges the need for inclusivity and opens the opportunity to measure its success .
Professor Colette Henry , Dundalk Institute of Technology ( DkIT )
I am taking the lead on a research project called the Global Women ’ s Entrepreneurship Policy where we compare policies from different countries . The results we ’ re finding is that issues are the same worldwide and one of the interesting things globally is there are few statements that set out exactly what needs to be done to encourage women ’ s entrepreneurship .
Professor Joan Ballantine , UU Just to follow up on something Barbara said , I think the lack of data makes it difficult to have a conversation with government to encourage them to engender a change in this area of policy development . And in the absence of the data the issue just isn ’ t high up on the agenda . But who ’ s responsibility is it to collect the data ? I think it is incumbent on government to do so to inform their own policy making .
Roseann Kelly , Women in Business
Even though Women in Business has not had government support for a number of years now , people look to us for information on what is happening in this area . And because there wasn ’ t anything available , we felt we had to provide training and developed the Power of Four programme even though
18 www . businessfirstonline . co . uk
Colette Henry , Lyndsey Davy , Research Student , Grainnne McVeigh , InvestNI , Prof Joan Ballantine , Ulster University , Gavin Walker , Business First , Professor Pauric McGowan , Ulster University , Professor Barbara Orser , University of Ottawa , Tina McKenzie , Staffline Ireland and Roseann Kelly , Women in Business NI
our core business is as a business network and not a training provider .
But what we have shown time and time again is that when a programme is womenspecific , they will come forward and the results will be very impressive . And hopefully we will be able to capture the data and results for future reference and to inform government policy .
I did tour all of the new Councils who are being given the responsibility for economic development , and while they gave the nod to supporting women ’ s entrepreneurship , they didn ’ t really acknowledge the need for a separate programme and to be honest , probably don ’ t have the funds or expertise to put it in place .
Having shown that we are able to provide effective training , we secured private funding for continued delivery . That has recently been matchfunded by Stormont and to me that is a big step change . Hopefully as a followon to this ‘ female enterprise ’ will actually make it into the Programme for Government and keep the issue on the agenda .
Grainne McVeigh , InvestNI The work that I do in InvestNI is gender neutral and it strikes me that while the long term focus should be on raising female entrepreneurship into the Programme for Government and up the agenda , there are things we can be doing now to make sure that the programmes we already have in place are not ruling women out .
All of our work is equality tested , but there might be some small things we could do to achieve more . It ’ s like having somebody sitting on your shoulder saying ‘ think , think , think ’.
A lot of the work I am doing is around scalingup and many of the companies in my sights are family businesses where the second or third generation are making the effort to scaleup their business . It could be a son or daughter , it ’ s really a matter of who ’ s next . But I wonder if there are particular things that we can change to make sure that the support is equally as available to females as it is to males .
For example , access to funding is always an issue whether for men or women . But we need to be aware of issues that might create additional barriers for women .
We have acknowledged that there is a lack of Angel and VC funding in Northern Ireland which is why the government has put money into a number of funds like Kernel Capital and Whiterock and a lot of these funds are actually run by women .
It could be that we use these existing channels to gather data . It ’ s a matter of asking for it . After all , government is the paymaster , so it ’ s a matter of saying ‘ guys , this would be