Technological Strategies to Increase Performance of Women-Owned SMEs

Abstract

Women empowerment and women entrepreneurship has become interesting topic in many researches. This growing attention triggered by education and socio-cultural betterment towards women. Nowadays people see women as important as men in professional context, including their important role to lead and create enterprises. Not only in developed countries, women in developing economy also build opportunities to create enterprises (Motukuri, 2010). There are large number of enterprises in developing economy owned by women (Deka, 2018). The enterprises dominated by small and medium scale enterprises. Instead of rapid development in women enterprises, there are also challenges. Global market provides new chance yet tight competition at the same time. Technological change is one of the key strategies to win competition and increase company performance (Akman and Dagdeviren, 2018). The use of technology in SME's owned by women in developing economies has grow significantly. Technology in this context is not only about Information Communication and Technology (ICT) that has widespread user nowaday. The technology in this context also involving processing technology, for example handling and packaging. Based on prevoius research, the use of technology has brought women enterprises into better business performance and growth. The example of this growth are opening new market, increasing production capacity and adding product diversification (Suhaimi et al, 2018). This research aim to recognize the diverse of strategies to technology in SMEs owned by women, by unfolding the following research questions : 1) What key technology that use to increase business performance in SMEs owned by women? 2) To what extent the business growing? 3) What are the most important influences for women entrepreneur in using the technology? 4) What kind of collaboration that moderating the use of technology to increase business performance for women entrepreneur? Keywords: SMEs, Scale up, Woman Entrepreneurship, Technology Adoption, Technology Strategy.