Are Opportunity and Necessity Based Women Entrepreneurs any Different?

Abstract

 The objective of this paper is to explain how necessity-based women entrepreneurs in emerging markets tend to incline more towards survivability, ignoring aspects of growth. While, opportunity-based women entrepreneurs emphasize more on growth, often overlooking survivability. The existing literature has failed to perceive both together, merging opportunity and necessity-based women entrepreneurs in the context of business growth. We aim to address this gap, through the paper and touch upon concepts of enterprise survivability and scalability wherein we discuss a third bracket of entrepreneurship that emerges out of viewing both necessity and opportunity constructs together. The findings suggest that while the motivation behind women pursing necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship may be different in developing regions of the world like Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and East and South Asia, their end points happen to be the same. Both opportunity and necessity-based women entrepreneurs, irrespective of their motivations to start their businesses, struggle with aspects of business growth. Hence, to exploit the potential of women-led ventures, it is significant that we focus on achieving business growth and simultaneously sustain enterprises. While the paper highlights a descriptive research analysis, it also supplements the existing literature on growth drivers for necessity-based entrepreneurs and explores variations in the entrepreneurial process within opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship. This paper provides an insight into how women entrepreneurs can cater to enhancing human development indicators which will have an indirect impact on pushing sustainable development goals in a forward direction.