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Innovative activity and gender dynamics

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Abstract

We explore the innovative performance of firms resulting from their Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) research-funded projects in terms of the gender dynamics of the firms. Using commercialization as the relevant performance metric, we find that Phase II projects led by a female principal investigator (PI) have greater probability of being commercialized in female-owned firms than in male-owned firms. This result is consistent with the findings from other settings that females tend to perform better when working under a female supervisor.

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Notes

  1. Lazarsfeld and Merton (1954, p. 23) wrote: “Perhaps we shall be allowed, therefore, to summarize the fifteen-word phrase, ‘a tendency for friendships to form between those who are alike in some designated respect’ by the single word homophily …”.

  2. More detailed discussions of the history of the SBIR program are in Link and Scott (2012) and Leyden and Link (2015).

  3. To be eligible for an SBIR award, the firm must be: organized and operated for profit, with a place of business in the United States, which operates primarily within the United States or which makes a significant contribution to the U.S. economy through payment of taxes or use of American products, materials, or labor; more than 50% owned and controlled by one or more individuals who are citizens or permanent resident aliens of the United States; and has not more than 500 employees, including affiliates. Eleven agencies currently participate in the SBIR program: the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, and the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services (which includes the National Institutes of Health), Transportation, and, most recently, Homeland Security.

  4. When the SBIR program was reauthorized in 1992, this purpose statement was changed to read: “to provide for enhanced outreach efforts to increase the participation of socially and economically disadvantaged small business concerns, and the participation of small businesses that are 51% owned and controlled by women.” The data that we analyze below are for the years 1992 through 2010. There is not, however, and increasing trend in the percent of Phase II awards to women-owned firms over this time period. These results are available from the authors on request.

  5. Currently, Phase I awards generally do not exceed $150,000 for six months.

  6. Currently, Phase II awards generally do not exceed $1,000,000 for two years.

  7. See Leyden and Link (2015) for a chronological history of the reauthorization of the SBIR program.

  8. The Small Business Technology Transfer Act of 1992 established the STTR program. The STTR program is modeled after the SBIR program, and it has the following goal, as stated in the 1992 Act: “[T]o facilitate the transfer of technology developed by a research institution through the entrepreneurship of a small business concern.”

  9. The data from the 2005 NIH survey are fully described in National Research Council (2009), and the data from the 2014 NIH survey are fully described in National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2015).

  10. See, https://www.sbir.gov/

  11. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first paper to examine statistically any of the 2014 data collected by the NRC.

  12. Others (e.g., Siegel and Wessner, 2012; Audretsch and Link, 2018) have examined various output measures, such as patents or publications, associated with a SBIR-funded Phase II project using data from the 2005 NRC survey. We refrain from referring to such output measures as performance measures or even success measures because they are not a legislatively-defined purposeful outputs from a Phase II project. Our performance measure of commercialization is directly related to purpose statement (4) of the SBIR program as noted above.

  13. We do not know if there was a female PI involved in any of the previous Phase II awards.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Elon University, Elon, NC, USA

    Steven Bednar

  2. University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA

    Dora Gicheva & Albert N. Link

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  1. Steven Bednar
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  2. Dora Gicheva
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Correspondence to Albert N. Link.

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Bednar, S., Gicheva, D. & Link, A.N. Innovative activity and gender dynamics. Small Bus Econ 56, 1591–1599 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-019-00282-2

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