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Purpose: Entrepreneurship is one of the best ways towards self-sufficiency and poverty alleviation for women in a country without guaranteed employment. The research contributes and provides reasons for supporting women’s entrepreneurship, as although it is well-documented that women’s entrepreneurship increases economic growth, other approaches need attention, especially those related to sustainability.

Need for the study: Women have superior emotional intelligence, resilience, and capacity to maintain a healthy work–life balance; women make better business and entrepreneurial leaders. Many businesses see encouraging women to join the workforce as a key to achieving sustainability goals. This study will provide valuable insights into the role of female entrepreneurs in driving sustainable business practices in the USA and India – rural India and urban India.

Methodology: The chapter adopts a descriptive research design methodology in conducting a thorough literature review on the evolution of women entrepreneurship in India. The case-based approach has been adopted to depict women entrepreneurs and their growth stories. The analysis is based on qualitative analysis of secondary data and primary data. This research proposes exciting revelations regarding the trend of women entrepreneurship in India and, from a global perspective, challenges women entrepreneurs face in organised and unorganised sectors in India and policies in different countries that promote women entrepreneurship towards sustainability.

Findings: Women business owners in India help the economy thrive, reduce poverty, and have a greater chance of shaping India’s destiny. This chapter looks at how entrepreneurial actions affect cultural morals and values. Women’s business growth rates vary from country to country, and this variation is influenced by the fact that countries can be broadly categorised as either developed or developing.

Introduction: Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role in the economic development of economies by generating job opportunities. Considering their significance, understanding the challenges and skills required in these enterprises becomes essential and timely.

Purpose: This study aims to discuss the limitations and skill gaps faced by SMEs in emerging economies, such as India, Indonesia, Brazil, China, Malaysia, Ghana, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Türkiye, UAE, Iran, Kazakhstan, Türkiye, Zambia, Romania, and Vietnam.

Methodology: The study adopts a systematic review and meta-synthesis approach, utilising a literature review to comprehensively analyse, synthesise, and map the existing literature by identifying overarching themes.

Findings: The study examines the challenges SMEs encounter in emerging economies, including resource scarcity, limited access to credit, inadequate infrastructure, low technology adoption, restricted global market access, and ineffective marketing strategies. There is a notable shortage of skilled labour and development initiatives within SMEs in India even though the country has a sizeable pool of qualified workers. There is a pressing need for additional technical and managerial skills to remain competitive in the market. The findings of this study will assist HR managers in addressing skill shortages among employees in SMEs operating within emerging economies

Introduction: Amidst Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA), turbulence is a vital component of an entrepreneurial landscape. VUCA world has set a new dynamic in the business environment and organisation’s settings. In such an environment, it is pertinent for entrepreneurs to exhibit creativity, innovative service behaviour, and performance.

Purpose: The study investigates whether creativity, innovative service behaviour, and performance of entrepreneurs are fostered through employee engagement practices in a highly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment.

Methodology: The methodology involves a systematic review and meta-synthesis. By identifying the major topics, a systematic literature review helped critically analyse and synthesise the literature.

Findings: According to the study, corporate entrepreneurial factors like (management reinforcement, reward/reinforcement, job autonomy/discretion, time attainability, and organisational boundaries) entrepreneurial potential, entrepreneurial orientation, human capital, self-efficacy beliefs lead to employee engagement, which, in turn, fosters creativity, innovative service behaviour, and performance among entrepreneurs in the VUCA world.

This chapter focuses on critical thinking as a new, powerful, and specialized tool and technique for understanding and analyzing the subtle operations of the free enterprise capitalist market system and its ethics and morality. Everything in the world of consumers and market enterprise systems are determined by our supply–demand system that in turn are determined by our presumed limitless production–distribution and consumption (LDPC) systems. From a critical thinking viewpoint, we study the free enterprise capitalist system (FECS) as a dynamic, interconnected organic system and not as a discrete or compartmentalized body of disaggregate parts. Systems thinking with critical thinking calls for a shift of our mindset from seeing just parts to seeing the whole reality in its structured dynamic unity; both mandate that we see ourselves as active participators or partners of FECS and not as mere cogs in its wheels or as mere factors of its production processes. Critical thinking seeks to identify the “structures” that underlie complex situations in FECS with those that bring about high- versus low-leveraged changes in various versions of capitalism. Specifically, this chapter applies critical thinking to FECS as defined by its founder, Adam Smith, in 1776 to its fundamental and structural assumptions, and as supported or critiqued by serious scholars such as Karl Marx, Maynard Keynes, C. K. Prahalad and Allen Hammond (inclusive capitalism), John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia (conscious capitalism), and others.

Microenterprises (MEs) are vital to the growth and prosperity of economies around the world. All levels of society, from universities to national governments, have collaborated to improve the chances of survival and future growth of these businesses. The threat to life is serious, and unless concerted action is taken, the situation will spiral out of control. Policymakers and business leaders must work together to address the sustainability crisis. The study, therefore, set out to determine how various entrepreneurial skills (such as creativity, collaboration, networking, and risk-taking) affect the long-term viability of MEs. The overall objective of the study was to determine the importance of innovative problem-solving, collaboration, networking, and willingness to take calculated risks of microentrepreneurs for the long-term success of their businesses. A total of 274 microentrepreneurs in rural areas of the Ancash region of Peru were surveyed in the grocery, hardware, clothing, and food service sectors. The survival of the MEs was tested on four dimensions: innovation, leadership, networking, and risk-taking. According to the results, MEs managers can increase their longevity by cultivating creative skills, strengthening leadership as a key to business sustainability and survival, maximizing the use of networks to gain a market advantage and expand their customer base, and employing calculated risk-taking.

Introduction: According to the existing research, one of the key determinants of a company’s survival and market development is its ability to get bank loans or other external sources of finance for business expansion.

Purpose: The study aims to explore the factors affecting access to finance and their effects on the development of medium- and small-sized businesses. These factors include business size and age, profitability, the length of a company’s association with a commercial bank, and banking sector characteristics.

Need for the study: It is particularly crucial for small- and medium-sized businesses since they often have trouble getting funding from banks because they don’t supply the banks with the information they need to assess their loan application prospects, however, when a company’s economic and financial situation improves, banks get access to more information about the firms, and financing is thus more readily available.

Methodology: This research is based on qualitative methods, focus on an elaborative study of the existing literature, and provide suggestions based on the same.

Findings: The findings show that small- and medium-sized businesses, like those in other European nations, have less access to finance than large businesses. It revealed that the company’s size, liquidity, profitability, and banking industry state significantly influence the availability of bank loans.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the immigrant women entrepreneurship phenomenon by analysing management academic literature on the issue. Stemming from the most current data on immigration and from the awareness that entrepreneurship is a viable instrument of immigrant (women) integration and inclusion, this chapter analyses the most updated management results on the issue. The analysis is mainly centred on works published after 2019, and some interesting insights emerge. Among them, we can refer to the awareness that research on immigrant women entrepreneurship is still in its infancy. Although, indeed, immigrant entrepreneurs and women entrepreneurs have been analysed considerably by researchers, it has been mainly in isolation. Therefore, room for investigating still exists, and this chapter uncovers some possible future research avenues. Moreover, by reviewing the selected papers, it clearly emerges that not all immigrant women entrepreneurs are alike; different targets (that is, different ethnicities) must be addressed differently by policy makers when policy measurements are identified. In other words, generic programmes aimed at increasing entrepreneurship among immigrant women cannot necessarily be successful.

Why is it that, despite repeated claims that digital-content firms and internet-based businesses can internationalize everywhere almost instantly, many seem unable to profitably expand outside their home markets? Why have emerging market firms (EMNEs) caught up with established developed-country multinationals (DMNEs) so much faster than expected? In this chapter, the author argues that the clue to these two puzzles lies in the realization that, contrary to the dominant view in the international business (IB) literature that focuses only on the intangibles exploited by DMNEs and assumes that these firms are free to unilaterally decide on their mode of entry and operation, doing business in a foreign country is only possible if intangibles are bundled with complementary local resources, usually held by local firms. Taking into account these complementary local resources and their owners makes it clear that DMNEs are not always free to choose their entry mode but must enlist the cooperation of local resource owners. The need of digital-content and internet-based firms for local complementary resources also explains why they sometimes experience problems when expanding abroad. Lastly, control of complementary local resources provides EMNEs with a home advantage against DMNEs competing with them in their home market. The author shows how EMNEs can capitalize on this advantage to obtain the intangibles they lack and need. The fact that these advantages are available on efficient global markets, while complementary local resources are not, explains the surprising speed of EMNE catch-up.