Responsible Innovation by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789402417203
Publisher: Springer Netherlands

This includes policies aiming to encourage an increase of women in SME participation in international trade. The UN 2030 Development Agenda discusses the need for enhancing women’s economic education and training to support their equal rights and responsibilities, giving special attention to promoting the economic role of women the economy in general, and particularly in SMEs.

A 2015 article by the International Labour Organization (ILO), highlights the contributions of the SCORE project in contributing to gender equality in SMEs in developing countries. The article emphasizes that the “ILO has long supported the fight for equality in the world of work, through the development and promotion of labour standards, gender focused campaigns – such as the Women at Work Century Initiative” and that it is important how the SCORE project raises “awareness of gender issues among managers and employees” through training and support visits to SMEs.

Another successful initiative comes from the European Small Business Portal, which features success stories from SMEs across Europe. The stories are featured on the European Commission website and include an initiative from a Slovakian SME. Regionfemme is run by entrepreneur Luica Haquel, which provides consulting and training for women to start up their own businesses. By 2014, only 5 years after funding was received by the EU to launch Regionfemme, and 2 years after the participants concluded their trainings, Regionfemme had already made a difference, with 56 out of 107 participants opening their own businesses, thus increasing women entrepreneurs in Europe.

Additional initiatives include: UKRD Group, Gendered Innovations, Yellow Window, and GenPORT. UKRD Group is a multimedia company in the UK; diversity management is central to the company’s human resource strategic goals, which include the development of an inclusive and integrated workforce. Gendered Innovations is an ongoing website project which collects and documents case studies of research and innovation which highlights the relevance of gender issues. Yellow Window provides a toolkit (process model and checklist) for considering gender during the whole research and innovation process. GenPORT represents a community of practice concerning gender issues in science, technology and innovation.

The benefits from such initiatives are twofold, i.e. both for the business and for society overall. Specifically, in the above case studies, it has been observed that the adoption of gender, and overall workforce equality practices, has resulted in increased business opportunities, enhanced workforce morale, more opportunities for training and for employment, and overall improvement in productivity.

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