Women, entrepreneurship and leadership
Published 31 July 2012
What does it mean to be a woman leading an entrepreneurial business? Dr Valerie Stead, Director of the Academy for Women, Diversity and Leadership, a research forum based at Lancaster University Management School, hosted a research workshop in July 2012 to explore this question.
The workshop, organised in association with the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development, brought together academic and entrepreneurial perspectives on being a woman entrepreneur. Funded by the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies, the workshop is one of a series of events that the Academy runs to share knowledge, to network and to identify new directions for research.
Speakers included Professor Claire Leitch from LUMS; Professor Kiran Trehan of the University of Birmingham; Becki Cross, Managing Director of Events Northern Ltd; Alison Park, one of the Park family who runs Low Sizergh Barn in Cumbria; and Jacqui Jackson, Vice Chair of the National Guild of SPAR (UK) Ltd and also a PhD student at LUMS.
“I love leaving the business for the day,” said Alison Park of Low Sizergh Barn in Cumbria, “It's great to detach myself from all the day-to-day operations and the daily grind, and come down here where the questions and debates are different, and people are engaged in different things – I find it really stimulating and energising.”
Professor Claire Leitch, of Lancaster’s Institute for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development, said: “It’s been wonderful so far. There have been some very useful talks by academics but interspersed with perspectives from practitioners. It’s very useful to get all these different perspectives – it allows you to think about your own research and challenge it.”
Dr Valerie Stead, who organised the workshop, said: “I’m hoping that today we’ll identify lots of ideas and themes from which we can run future events.”
