Entrepreneurial learning and the success of Welsh businesswomen

Abstract

This paper reports on a study of women entrepreneurs running MSMEs in South Wales, a region characterised as having a weak entrepreneurial culture compared to other parts of the UK (Fotopoulos and Storey, 2017). One reason for this weakness is perceived to be a lack of entrepreneurship education and in this paper we investigate the hypothesis behind this-that more entrepreneurship education has a positive effect on business success. The investigation consisted of three parts; a set of 59 questions (n=150), followed by a series of face-to-face interviews (n=37), and finally some detailed discussions (n=5). The main finding is that the hypothesis that entrepreneurship education makes a positive contribution to the success of women entrepreneurs needs to be modified to reflect the fact that it is entrepreneurial learning through technologically enabled networks that has such an effect, as it no longer makes sense in the age of social media to separate education from asynchronous networked learning, or to separate the technology from the networking within that learning. The practical implication of this research is that enterprise education courses and programmes designed to support female entrepreneurs need to take better account of the way such women learn. The limitation of the research is that the sample is from a relatively technologically enabled population.