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Policy for women's entrepreneurship is designed to promote economic growth, not least in depleted rural areas, but very little is known about the contributions of rural women entrepreneurs, their needs or how the existing policy is received by them. Using a theoretical framework developed by Korsgaard et al. (2015), the authors analyse how rural women entrepreneurs contribute to rural development and discuss the implications for entrepreneurship policy. This paper aims to focus on the aforementioned objectives.

The authors interviewed 32 women entrepreneurs in rural Sweden representing the variety of businesses in which rural Swedish women are engaged. The authors analysed their contributions to rural development by analysing their motives, strategies and outcomes using Korsgaard et al.’s framework of “entrepreneurship in the rural” and “rural entrepreneurship” as a heuristic, interpretative device.

Irrespective of industry, the respondents were deeply embedded in family and local social structures. Their contributions were substantial, multidimensional and indispensable for rural viability, but the policy tended to bypass most women-owned businesses. Support in terms of business training, counselling and financing are important, but programmes especially for women tend to miss the mark, and so does rural development policy. More important for rural women entrepreneurs in Sweden is the provision of good public services, including for example, schools and social care, that make rural life possible.

Theoretically, the findings question the individualist and a-contextual focus of much entrepreneurship research, as well as the taken-for-granted work–family divide. How gender and how the public and the private are configured varies greatly between contexts and needs contextual assessment. Moreover, the results call for theorising place as an entrepreneurial actor.

Based on the findings, the authors advise future policymakers to gender mainstream entrepreneurship policy and to integrate entrepreneurship and rural development policy with family and welfare state policy.

The paper highlights how rural women respond to policy, and the results are contextualised, making it possible to compare them to other contexts. The authors widen the discussion on contributions beyond economic growth, and the authors show that policy for public and commercial services and infrastructure is indeed also policy for entrepreneurship.

In this paper, the authors present an empirical framework that incorporates different factors of the impact of COVID-19 on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in La Rioja, Spain, in relation to the value chain, gender and family business and allows the evaluation of these impacts on the SMEs' outcomes.

The authors conduct exploratory research based on phone interviews with 329 business managers from SMEs in La Rioja (Spain), from June 1 to June 30 2021, using ordinary least squares linear regression and matching procedures to test the study hypotheses.

The results show that the impact of COVID-19 related to primary activities in adding value, such as inbound logistics, operations and marketing, have a positive influence on innovation outcomes in SMEs, as do female managers. Family SMEs present poorer innovation outcomes.

At the organizational level, this paper may be of interest to management, and at the national and regional levels to policymakers, since it could help to develop policies that support SMEs' sourcing, operations and marketing in order to prepare for potential value chain disruptions. Additionally, this research may help decision-makers to foster and promote innovation in SMEs as a way of ensuring their resilience.

In this paper, the authors provide novel evidence about the effect of COVID-19 in SMEs. Moreover, it has been shown that the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered the redefinition of supply chains at the organizational level.