Nascent entrepreneurship and the role of gender

In the last years, several authors have developed their research focusing on the topic of nascent entrepreneurship. From their analysis, a clear definition concerning nascent entrepreneurs has emerged. The authors define nascent entrepreneurs as individuals who are at the beginning of their activity and potential founders of a new venture ; nascent entrepreneurs are still in the process of organizing their businesses and activities but are not still involved in the full entrepreneurship cycle. Despite the consensus of “who the nascent entrepreneur is”, the multi-disciplinary approach used in the literature makes navigation difficult in the multitude of disciplines who embrace the topic. For this reason, in order to explore and acquire a prior understanding of the topic, the first paper of this research conducted an empirical study for exploring and systematizing the literature of nascent entrepreneurship. As a first step, this research utilized Co-citation approach to deeply discover the overview of the structure of the field. Furthermore, this method has shown the “invisible links” that connects the most important scholars of the subject and the conjunctions among their findings. The second and third papers have used the institutional theory for understanding the decisions of the nascent entrepreneurs according to their gender. In the studies, two specific external factors were identified that could affect nascent entrepreneurship decision according to their gender: culture and regulatory support of nascent women entrepreneurship. The two variables together take in consideration the three institutional pillars: regulatory (support of nascent women entrepreneurship), normative and cognitive (culture). The main goal of the second paper was to discover the effects of entrepreneurial culture and support of women entrepreneurship through women’s as well as men’s decisions and the correlation between the two factors. We have supposed that the higher the entrepreneurial culture is; the higher is the probability to be nascent entrepreneurs. In our opinion, entrepreneurial culture should affect both men and women. On the other hand, we have supposed that the specific factors of supporting women entrepreneurs should affect only women’s decisions. The paper helps to cover the gap in nascent entrepreneurship and gender literature. Specifically, the paper contributes to understand the different effects of institutions for men and women entrepreneurs. The third article deepens the research by considering one of the most important factors for entrepreneurs to launch and grow ventures: financing. Several researches have already shown discrepancy between men and women in financing their business. However, there is no research in the extant literature that reviewed how institutional factors affect the gender’s gap in financing. Thus, the third paper has covered this existing gap. We have supposed that the two institutional variables (culture and supporting women entrepreneurship) could reduce or boost the gender’s financing gap. The paper helps to highlight the differences between traditionalist and modern culture contributing towards the development of the literature of nascent entrepreneurship and institutional theory. Furthermore, the paper helps to develop knowledge about nascent entrepreneurship and gender analysing details that would be considered useful by both policy makers and scholars. Together, these three papers, represents an important contribution for nascent entrepreneurship research. The three papers contribute with different perspectives to discover some details of the role of gender in nascent entrepreneurship research. Furthermore, they provide a comprehensive and coherent understanding of institutional effects on nascent entrepreneurship and gender.