Women Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Rural Development in India

Rural development implies both the economic betterment of the people living in rural areas as well as bringing out holistic development. Accordingly, government has made paradigm shift from individual-centric rural development support to creation of gainful self-employment as well as wage employment among rural masses. Entrepreneurship, in this direction, has become an important consideration. Economic growth of a region largely depends on the involvement of poor and marginal sections into the process of entrepreneurship development. Globally, a large number of unemployed youth and women are becoming self-employed through entrepreneurship and creating employment opportunities for others. Researchers have worked on women's empowerment, economic development, and their role on micro-credit movement. The work on role of women in sustainable development is very limited. This chapter has tried to analyse issues related to women entrepreneurships in light of sustainable rural development in India to meet the research gap in the current context of Indian rural economy.

Green Innovation and Sustainable Urban Ecosystems

This chapter is aimed to analyze the relationships between environmental sustainability, urban ecosystems, and green innovation. The method employed is the critical analytical review of literature and further discussion on the issues focusing the city´s experience on managing the formulation, generation, development, implementation, and evaluation of new behaviors and ideas in green innovation. It is concluded that the green innovation is directly related with the environmental sustainability and urban ecosystems. The interest of this analysis lies in providing support to urban settlements in managing the risks inherent in green area innovation, incremental or radical as a community's management would experience in relation to the environmental sustainability in urban ecosystems.

Stakeholder Information Flow From Horse Entrepreneurs to Customers

This study focuses on emphasizing the instrumental role of stakeholder analysis and the concept of business ecosystem. Specifically, a stakeholder relationship might provide the channel for the particular instrumental targets of a business subset. This kind of stakeholder management is based on a principal-agent relationship between industry actors. However, this example, which focuses on horse entrepreneurs and the infectious diseases of this subset of the equine industry, shows that instead of a simple principal-agent relationship, stakeholder management might yield a chain of principal-agent relationships in the form of a principal-agent/principal-agent relationship (for example, one or more of the stakeholders simultaneously takes on the role of both agent and principal). According to the analysis, horse entrepreneurs have this kind of double role in stakeholder management for the prevention of infectious diseases.

Growing Opportunities in Attracting Investments for the Sustainable Socio-Economic Development of the ATU Gagauzia (Republic of Moldova)

This chapter discusses the wide range of created opportunities for stimulating, developing the business area and attracting investments in the region of ATU Gagauzia. The general idea of the chapter is the fact that only developing the economy at the expense of domestic and foreign investments can create jobs, increase budget revenues, and accordingly, develop social infrastructure and living standards in the ATU Gagauzia (Republic of Moldova). The analysis of indicators characterizing the development of entrepreneurial activity in the autonomy was conducted, the dynamics of indicators showing the improvement of the business and investment climate in the region was presented, and the creation of favorable conditions in terms of attracting investment in main sectors of the region's economy was presented. This chapter carries out the qualitative conclusions and presents information on the need to develop the important directions that will enable the achievement of the goals for improving investment clime and increasing of volume in the region ATU Gagauzia.

Depth of Outreach and Financial Sustainability of Microfinance Institutions

Microfinance institutions tend to rely on donations and subsidies to achieve their social objective of outreach to the poor. Over the years, the industry has experienced tremendous growth, with donor funding pouring in. The question, however, arises whether microfinance firms can operate and continue to serve the poor clients on cost-covering basis without ongoing subsidies. There has been a growing tendency in the industry, which was traditionally a domain of not-for-profits, to embrace commercialization and pursue profitability to ensure self-sustainability. This chapter makes an empirical revisit to an inconclusive research question: Is there a trade-off between microfinance outreach and sustainability? Based on data for 1,232 microfinance firms from 43 countries, the study confirms the existence of trade-off between the two bottom lines of microfinance.

Assessing Regional Advantage Based on Smart Specialisation Strategies

Making smart regions smarter through smart specialization strategies (RIS3) is today on the political and economic agenda. In this context, it becomes a priority to know the regional stakeholders' perception of RIS3, based on the prioritization of the use of resources and capacities in their territories. The aim of this study is to perform a bibliometric analysis with the keywords smart specialization, regional innovation systems, and value, rareness, imitability, and organization (VRIO). The authors aim to contribute to the clarification of the literature on regional innovation ecosystems. They also intend to suggest a new model that allows the VRIO model to be adapted to the territories. Through extensive research using the Web of Science database, five clusters were identified (multiple helix; smart specialization and RIS3; innovation and entrepreneurship; regional policies and knowledge transfer and technology commercialization; regional growth, entrepreneurial, and innovative ecosystem), whose content analysis allowed to construct the conceptual regional helix assessment model.

Exploring Internationalization in Sustainable Entrepreneurship

Sustainable entrepreneurship has become a central topic in research, although there exists a lack of study between the approaches to internationalization in sustainable businesses. This chapter aims at providing an examination of the relationship between SE and internationalization. In this way, the question of how and why firms involved in SE enter international markets, their challenges and difficulties in the process, and the different pathways are explored. Especially, the focus lies on the impact of SE involvement on the engagement in an international process. To achieve this goal, two main streams of literature are used: internationalization theories and sustainable entrepreneurship theory. The discussion section offers some future research questions worth studying.

The Context Facets of Sustainability Entrepreneurial Orientation (SEO) Through the Lense of Gender

Addressing sustainable development and societal challenges have been placed at the heart of all government priorities, detachedly of country stage of development, as a mean to achieve prosperity through social cohesion and equality. In this setting, entrepreneurship appears to be a powerful tool to encompass economic, social, and environmental goals, particularly when sustainability oriented. Sustainability oriented entrepreneurs (henceforth SEO) are still focused in profit maximization strategies combined with environmental respect and social inclusion and rely on a firm-based entrepreneurship initiative integrating the triple bottom line. The chapter aims to understand the role of culture (culture and social norms) on SEO activity among several countries, along with gender heterogeneity. Specifically, the study determines the moderating effect of (national) culture on SEO. The study uses a logistic regression and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) database from 2015, with information of 60 countries.

Teaching Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Leadership

Sustainability has been a part of the corporate lexicon for over a decade now. This has made it important for business schools across the globe to recognize the importance of sustainability and incorporate it into the curricula to train future managers. There are very few instances of having a core specialization being offered in the area of sustainability in an Indian management institute. This case study is an experiential documentation of a course titled Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Leadership offered at a leading university in India. This is a case study of the development of course in Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Leadership: its curriculum design, pedagogy, and evaluation methods. Through this course, an attempt was made to introduce the concept of sustainability in leadership and entrepreneurial ventures to the students. Also, a tryst was made to develop an appreciation towards the triple bottom line of profit, people, and the planet.

Approaches to Sustainable and Responsible Entrepreneurship

Nowadays, sustainable and responsible entrepreneurship seem to represent the most important goals targeted by the economic business environment at a worldwide scale. In addition, creativity, innovation, and intellectual capital are seen as drivers for organizational performance, particularly in the context of ensuring the right balance in terms of market competition, in the quest for retaining different forms of competitive advantages. Nonetheless, although the general vision of maximizing profit, in the case of producers, and of enhancing satisfaction, in the case of consumers, still governs the economic rules specific to any marketplace, there is a general concern for the future generations, as well as ecology and environmental wellbeing. Under these circumstances, at least for now, all the answers seem to lie in the entrepreneurs' ability to act much more mature, liable, competent, proficient, and efficient, while managing at a higher and improved level of performance their business operations.