A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Thomas Domboka
start their own businesses (Bird and Brush, 2002; Marlow and Carter, 2005; Marlow and Carter, 2006)
and as a result they prefer to start businesses that are smaller and which require smaller amounts of
finance which they can afford from their personal savings and help from family and friends. Apart from
structural discrimination on the part of banks and risk aversion on the part of women entrepreneurs,
Carter and Shaw (2006) suggest that gender based differences in their perception of access to
finance has contributed significantly to the differences in the amount of finance used by men and
women.
3. Research process
This qualitative piece of work was conducted using face to face semi structured interviews with 35
migrant black African female entrepreneurs based in the Birmingham area of the West Midlands,
United Kingdom. Birmingham is the 2 nd largest city in Britain with a large number of migrants. The
interviews which were recorded on tape lasted on average one hour each and they were conducted
over a period of four months between September and December 2011. An interview schedule was
used to guide the researcher during the interviews and to ensure that all key areas were covered. The
interview tapes were manually transcribed immediately following each interview. The interview
transcripts were then analysed thematically resulting in preliminary findings which are presented the
sections that follow. The participants were identified using the purposive snowball sampling strategy
in order to ensure a fair representation of women of different backgrounds from different African
countries. The interviews were conducted within the business premises of each participant.
Preliminary results from the study are presented in the following sections. The women who took part
in the study were drawn from 13 African countries and the business they operate cover different
sectors of the economy. The businesses are small and fairly new with the majority having been
started in the last three years. The participants had been in the country for about 10 years with only
three participants having been in the country for longer than 10 years. While the study does not
propose any hypothesis, it is rather exploratory and inductive in order to meet objectives of the study.
The objective of the paper is to identify the entrepreneurial resources these women start with when
they go into business and the difficulties they face in acquiring the different resources and the effect
this has on their entrepreneurial ambitions.
4. Findings and discussion
4.1 Human capital
Academic background; the women in the study displayed a strong academic background. Figure 1
show that 40 per cent of the women were educated to degree level with a further 17 per cent having
post graduate qualifications like Master’s degrees or equivalent. Those educated below degree level
made up 39 per cent with only five per cent of them not having secondary school level education.
Most of the women acquired their graduate and post graduate qualifications in the UK.
Figure 1: Level of education of participants
177