Call for chapters
A RESEARCH AGENDA FOR GENDER AND INNOVATION: KEY CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
We are seeking contributions to the collected volume on A Research Agenda for Gender and Innovation. Key challenges and prospects for the future. Chapters authored by both senior and junior scholars are welcome. We anticipate that authors build on work in progress and data that has already been collected. We invite scholars from institutions around the world to contribute with empirical or conceptual work. The maximum length of each chapter is about 15 pages/6,000 words. Please see the full call attached.
We invite potential contributors to submit a tentative title, an abstract (max. 500 words) and keywords (max. 6) for their intended chapter. The abstract should include the objectives of the chapter, the methods used, and the potential findings and implications of your work for research and practice. Abstracts should be submitted by email with the heading 'A Research Agenda for Gender and Innovation Submission' to Cristina.Diaz@uclm.es no later than 30th of April 2024. Feedback will be given within 3 weeks. Accepted authors are invited to submit their full chapter. Full chapters will go through a double-blind review.
SUBMISSION DEADLINES
Abstracts April 30, 2024
Submission of full chapters: 31st October 2024
BACKGROUND
The gender issues of innovation are seldom discussed, as innovation often has a system perspective ignoring individuals as actors making gender invisible (Alsos et al., 2013). It requires a deeper look to discover that innovation is gendered. This is done by analysing discourses in innovation policies to investigate who are those considered to be involved in innovation or seen as the users of innovation. Women's contribution to innovation is often overlooked or at least underestimated. This includes their role as innovative entrepreneurs but also their roles in product and process innovation within established organisations. For instance, gender diversity may have the potential to drive research-based innovation. This diversity is linked to gender diverse teams but also to the methods used and problems addressed (Nielsen, Block and Schiebinger, 2018). Furthermore, the way we understand innovation and particularly high potential innovation have gendered connotations, with implications e.g. for resource allocation to innovation projects. And importantly, the often-implicit bias through omission may in fact be a key mechanism in upholding and generating gendered biases that increase inequalities (O'Dwyer, 2022: 60).
While the literature is still scarce, the issue of gender and innovation is an issue for scientific research since the beginning of this century (Alsos et al., 2013; 2016, Nählinder et al. 2015). Most analyses focus on the experiences of women or in the ways gendering processes affect women, but many others highlight gendered processes and structures that contribute to our understandings of innovation and innovation agents (Alsos et al., 2016). This is why some authors call for research making men and masculinities explicit objects of theorizing and problematizing masculinities in the field of innovation (Hearn, 2004). Further research is needed about the complex ways of doing and undoing femininities and masculinities in innovation work to grasp the complexity created by the movements and the flexibility of those positions (Pecis, 2016). Besides focusing on the experiences of women, we need further research how men (and non-binary individuals) in different positions and contexts experience innovation activities and what kind of masculinities innovation work invokes. Feminist approaches can be helpful in both revealing the gendered structures but also open up spaces for feminist resistance and reimagining innovation in radically feminist ways (Pecis & Berglund, 2021).
By applying gender as a lens on innovation, we search for contributions that give insights on how to remedy gendered challenges that may pose a problem not only for a person but for global economic and sustainable development. In so doing, we hope that this will inspire and create a better understanding of the gendered construction of innovation as well as the gendering practices of doing (undoing) gender in innovation.
CONTENT
Chapters could include, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Participation of women in innovation pipeline, processes of digitalisation and innovation for sustainability
- Women innovating in male-dominated sectors, men innovating in female-dominated sectors
Gender and commercialization of innovation
- Impact of gender diversity in innovation results
- Gendered analysis of public interventions targeting innovative attitudes and activities
- Gender and innovation policy, innovation systems and innovation support schemes
- Gender and innovation funding
- Gendering of incubators and accelerators
- Gendered work environments for innovation: competition, cooperation, workload and autonomy
- Gender and different innovation contexts
- Gender stereotypes and discrimination in cooperation for innovation
- Gender and open innovation
We look forward to receiving your contribution.
Cristina Díaz-García, University of Castilla La Mancha, Spain
Gry Agnete Alsos, Nord University, Norway
Ulla Hytti, University of Turku, Finland
Elisabet Ljunggren, Nord University, Norway
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Gry Alsos
Professor
Nord U. Business School
Bodø
+4775517651
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