Women Entrepreneurs in the Circular Economy: Global Experiences podcast

Transcript

The future is self-directed: rethinking how we learn

Francesca Lombardo: Hi, I'm Francesca Lombardo, and welcome to the Emerald Podcast Series. Today we are diving into what it means to be a woman entrepreneur in the circular economy and the unique challenges that come with it. I'm joined by Dr Lisbeth Clausen, Associate Professor Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, and author of women entrepreneurs in the circular economy, global experiences. In her book, she shares 10 powerful stories of women founders from seven different countries, funding from Japan to Colombia. Let's get into it.

LC: There were a lot of things during Covid that made me think, and I had been working for many years, 10 years actually, with large companies, multinationals such as Microsoft, Sony, Huawei, Novo Nordic, a Danish medical company, coloplus, ecosus and Ben and Olafson. And my field is organisational behaviour and design, and I worked with the task and the leadership of these small teams and observe them for a year in Tokyo. And then I decided that I wanted to take a look at a smaller unit. And I got really curious how to start a company, and how to get tasks done, and how to set your team. And I was also, at the time, thinking a lot about the global climate, and I was wondering if I could learn something about, you know, if I travelled from one end of the globe to the other and looked at women entrepreneurs, that I could learn something about how they set their teams, so that curiosity got me started. And maybe more specifically, actually, the aim of my study was, became, to create awareness and international visibility of the challenges of women entrepreneurs. And as I was going I was wondering, why are there still so many barriers for women entrepreneurs, and how do they navigate in this?

FL: Yeah, so I want to know more about how you developed the Women's Entrepreneurship model as a framework for this study. Are there key elements that defined and shaped your fieldwork?

LC: That's really a good question. I wanted to make a case book. Because that's how I've been working, and that's a really good way to get discussions into classrooms about the international. I was looking at 10 women entrepreneurs, and I set up one of the most important things about my work is that I've been working with Japan for 10 years, and altogether 25 so that's my expert area. And I realised very soon that when I was to look at women in other areas in Africa, in Latin America, in Europe and Middle East, that I needed an intermediary. So I started working with expert colleagues there. And because each of these women had such different takes on their business process, I had to make a system of how to write up these cases and also how to interview them and observe them. We stayed a month in each place. So I made up quickly, based on organisational behaviour and design, 10 questions and a model that I used everywhere. So that was the only systematic part of this kaleidoscope of business ways. I started in the middle what motivated the founder and what was her story, and just to see what ignited her, and you know, what drives her through. Then I looked at the products and services and looked at how they were sustainable. That means, how were they either reused or recycled or taking care and preserving artisanal goods and old craftsmanship. Then I looked at how she set the team. Who was she working with? What was her own capabilities? Because that's the most problematic when you have this wonderful idea, is to set a team and find people who can help you with the business part or the marketing or getting funding and so on. Next was to look at her business models. How did she actually bring value with her product or service, and how did she organise her whole value chains with and this is most important and very important for women to have legitimacy. That means that you are registered, that you have a bank account, that you have your IPR, your intellectual property rights for the product that you make. And then we looked at her clients, customers, investors, and we looked at, and this is very particular for the model for women, work life balance, because women, you know, often have to have other chores, caretaking chores. Then we looked at the prospects. What are her dreams? Is she going to upscale and sell off her company to make money for her investors, or is she going to build her brand internationally and so on? We looked at success criteria. Does she have any role models? This is very interesting, and we can maybe return to that. And what are the challenges and advantages of being a female founder? So this is something that I found to be most significant for the model, because we often don't ask male founders, what is it like to be a man as an entrepreneur, but we always somehow have the right or the curiosity to learn about what is it like to be a woman. You can use the model for men and women, but I think there are two interesting parts, the work-life balance, and also what it's like when you look at the gender. Last but not least, what surrounds these women and their business process, and that's the context, how are they looked upon as women, and what's the ecosystem like? Are there any incubators? Are there any funding schemes that can help and so on. Those are the 10 points that we asked every woman, and that's each case. Story talks around these 10 points.

FL: This brings me, actually, to my next question, which was, you selected 10 different women and their experiences. So I wanted to know, how do these different women define success, and how does that differ from the traditional business metrics that we know?

LC: I think what characterised these women? They are very good at doing business, and their businesses work, but at the end of the day, their metric of success was much more than profit. Of course, profit is important, but it became prosperity often and prosperity for their surroundings. Many of these women also became activists, and maybe we can talk about that a little later. But for instance, when you look at Maribu, was a tailor in Senegal. She did incredible business, and made clothing that was very affordable, and there are very few female tailors there, and so she had hired people. And as she grew her business larger, she also started hiring people to be carriers of her product, and she would help the community and hire people around her. She opened a new store, and she would hire people and build people. I think that extra thought of community is important. This also happened in when you look at the Nusa Pineda weavers, they have trouble because it's at the small island where they work. There isn't a lot of water, and you need water to make the original colouring. And so she gathered a great group of people, and they were very hesitant to be in the group, because they wanted to weave, as they always do, the traditional but she wanted to make scale and bulk and make money that way and support and make a support system. So I think that sense of building community goes beyond the metrics of just scaling and making a profit. So the fact that they care about their communities and people around them, and try to take in, for instance, a grain by circular technology in Denmark too, was trying to hire people in their factory who might not be able to work elsewhere, but give them a chance to bring them up and to get them into a, you know, a nine to five job. So, that kind of extra going an extra mile to include your community, I think is something that I saw was particular to to the women that I looked at. I only studied these 10 women, but, but this seemed to be very important. Yeah, there's another example, and this is probably my best example of this inclusion. Was looking at Lily Mendoza, a native Cheyenne River Sioux in Rapid City, and she was doing great business, selling books in the Lakota language. This is a history, of course, of this, of her parents and grandparents being sent to boarding school and cut their hair and weren't allowed to speak Lakota language at the time. So she started, first of all, this very ambitious product of bringing Lakota books into the reservations. But after this, she also started working with a group of missing and murdered indigenous women, where she, every year, makes this red dress of a missing woman and writes her name on there, and she now has 88 dresses that she displays every May. But it just goes to show that the energy that she puts into her community goes beyond her business and this kind of activism, I found in many of my cases,

FL: It's quite touching and also the same time quite interesting to see, because obviously your research spans five different continents. So these shows, yes, they're all in business, but at the same time their culture. And the place where they live influences their way of working and carrying on a business. So what would you say were the most surprising insights that you encountered during your field work?

LC: I think the biggest surprise was that there are more women in entrepreneurship, but that they still have such trouble getting into networks and getting funding. In the Danish case, for instance, you have 25% women, but only 1% of venture capital goes to women. So that was surprising, I think. And we are even in a very privileged part of the world, when you were in the Nordics or Scandinavia or Denmark in this case. So that was a general surprise. The next surprise was and something that I learned was actually that we don't value the caretaking more, because all these women were caretakers. The Sina Gaya from Senegal, had five children, and she was in an incubator system and did the whole scheme of setting up her product and applied for a lot of fundings. And she was saying, I wish there in the funding scheme was just one rubric where you could write, you know, maternity leave, or if you have a family, like when we were there, it was during Ramadan, and she was so busy introducing her new product and getting getting the certification, as we were there, and she also had to take care of the family's tradition with Ramadan, and when it ends, and there's a big celebration, so she was cooking for several days. There is some policy that needs to change, or some kind of network of systemic support for women that is not in place that would really help them out. That was a big surprises, but some findings, and I think little surprises for me, having worked in Japan for so many years, was the young woman there, Remy Yano, who is doing a recycling of carton, water cartons, and she's the first one that doesn't use plastic bottles, and so she recycles the cartons and makes them into toilet paper. So interesting for her, because she has a virtual team. She has, of course, people overlooking the finance and marketing and so on, but she's, they're virtual, and she outsources a lot of her business. It's very traditional, when you meet with a group of people, that the elder men will fall asleep during these meetings. It's called Inamori, that you are still there, but you are taking a little snooze. And so this is accepted in Japan. It isn't anywhere else in the world, but, but for her, and I thought, and I was asking her, what is it like to be a young woman and then meeting these very conservative people, and they take a nap as you're trying to do your pitch. And she said, she just she goes into that with a light hearted spirit, she smiles, and she writes her contracts, and off she goes. So this was so interesting, how she managed to do business in a very conservative environment. And she's also in the food and and beverage industries, which is very conservative. So this was a very nice surprise. It was also a surprise to see how agile and and lean her organisation was and how she was able to use technology. This was, I think, one of the big surprises and very hopeful findings.

FL: Yeah, so interesting to see how in different parts of the world, women find their way despite the challenges and the barriers that they find. For example, another question that I wanted to ask you was, how did you find access to finance and networks a barrier for these women entrepreneurs? Did you find any innovative strategies or support systems that helped them overcome these challenges?

LC: Yeah, I think that in Europe and in many parts of the world, there's a lot of systems that ended the Nordic countries to set up systems to help finance. But as I understood from, for instance, talking to Evia Freeman Anderson, who's the CEO and founder of a grain by-circular technology. She started in 2019 just before covid, and she has been trying to get funding, and she's been very successful at it. She's still ongoing, but she wants to change the food industry and get them to use this bent grain as an ingredient into all kinds of makings of chips and rolls and bread. And it's difficult to change consumers, but it's very difficult to change the food industry and get industrial players to use this new grain product. But she has had been successful with investors. When you do investors, and this is for men and women, when you do get investments, they all have different agendas. So you have to decide also, a lot of times who you choose to be on board. But what she said on and on again, is. Is that when you pitch often as a woman, you're asked, well, what can go wrong? What if your strategy doesn't work? What are your tactics? And if it doesn't work, then what are you going to do with this? Are you sure you're going to have a return of investment, Roy for your investors and so on. So as a woman, as she leaves the room, she doesn't feel encouraged, but she's thinking, What is even my idea? So I think it's more uphill. It's difficult to be an entrepreneur, but as I understand from the experiences, it's much more uphill. You have to from the start, you are looked as how are you going to fail this rather than how is it going to become a success? And you can just imagine what it's like to always pitch against something. We had a book launch last week, and the Danish industry had a representative there, and they had done research also on this. And the problem is, of course, that, or she said that the solution would be to have education and just educate women at a much earlier age, already in school, when you're in high school, or earlier than that, so that we start getting more role models. Because that's a problem. And I think many of the women that I asked to really didn't have a role model, or they even thought their daughters were role models, because they are a new generation and come into this world, maybe in a different way, but they didn't have role models, because nobody has taken that path before them. That's interesting too. Or Hailem Brundtland, who was one of the climate activists for Global Compact, she was once asked by a little boy who put his hand up and said: can boys also be prime ministers? So, I just think that that just hammers home how important it is to have a role model. Sina Lindstrom, from Danish industry, has done research on this, and we need to just have entrepreneurial education at an earlier stage, so that that girls and young girls and can can see that this can be done.

FL: You mentioned many of the entrepreneurs in your book are also activists. How do they balance business goals with social and environmental missions?

LC: That's a good one. For instance, Lily Mendoza, that I mentioned, her son actually passed from diabetes when he was 21 so she knew about grief. And I think as she became more successful in her book business, she realised that you must do something. She knew about grief, and she started connecting with the women who had lost their daughters in the territory. And at the beginning, they were very surprised. They were like, Why are you? Nobody ever asked me about this and what? Why are you calling me? But eventually, she started to get more and more women to sign up, and now she has this whole movement and works with the missing and murdered women. Mm, IR, and she takes the time. It's part of her life. So this is a very interesting case, and it's very hard. I mean, working with grief, I could tell it wears her down, but she does it, and she goes to the sacred places, and she smothers herself with sage and cleanses for her tribe and community. And this is how she keeps herself going, but, but it's it's hard work. It's about suffering. But she's a very successful book business woman, and she now bought up another book business with her son and her daughter is part of also the missing and murdered women organisation, and also with red ribbon society that tries to rejuvenate the old traditions. She doesn't speak Lakota herself. Of course, she regrets this, but her parents tried not to speak it and tried not to teach it to their children so they could integrate totally in the American society. So that's an interesting story. Another story that is much more working about activism is the very interesting Sungai Watch story from Indonesia, from Bali, where Kelly Benship and her two brothers grew up. They're French, and they started noticing how the beaches got more and more dirty, and they started cleaning up and with a team and more and more. And eventually they started an organisation. I can't remember when they registered. Was it in, also before Covid. And then they started big teams of people who were volunteers at first, and then they started their company. And now they have, from just since I was there, they had 120 local locals hired, and now they've hired more than 200 they call them the River warriors. And they set up barriers, river barriers that you can also sponsor and support. But what they do, the activism here is that they connect with the government. They try to go to schools to educate children, to start cleaning up. The whole problem in Indonesia and Bali is that they re not able to sort trash, and it still goes to the dumps. So it's a real problem that they try to solve. They have been working with donations only and then recycling the plastic. Just recently, they started making chairs of the plastic, and are working now with designers to make a very nice product. So that's interesting to see how they can work with as a NGO first and then now also as a business. But I think the whole activist lesson detracr is that they are actually doing something to recycle and clean up plastic in a whole country. Yeah, wow. I'm telling you, it is, you know, when you're in the mangroves, you know, you're it's, it's dusty and dirty, and it's fine. You can work for hours. The thing is, they have collected 8.8 tonnes trash, which is a lot, and every impressive. It's very impressive. And what happens is that you come out in the morning and there's trash again, I think it's so tough and it's so dirty, and you have the locals work there, and they do such a good job, and the siblings are just continuously, you know, thinking of new ways and leading these both volunteers, but also their own workers to clean beaches and rivers and mangroves.

FL: That's such a beautiful thing to do. Imagine, if all of us did that, we wouldn't have the problem with the trash that we have now all around the world.

LC: You're in the UK and I'm in Denmark, and we still can get by on the beaches and in the streets. We don't have to kick our way from trash. But it gets worse and worse, especially in Bali, with all the tourists and all the flip flops.

FL: But also the fast fashion companies that just dump their trash in these countries,

LC: We have a lot of our trash going to Indonesia and also to Ghana. I was in Senegal, which is right above Ghana, and with the brand Maribou makes clothing. And I was asking, you know, when we try to figure out, well, what's the circularity in this? It's actually inherent in the culture. Because once you have worn your dresses or your gorgeous suits three or seven times, and you don't use it anymore, you give it to somebody, and then your friend or your family member will keep using it, and then they give it to somebody. This is really the ideal way of circulating things, but, but these countries have a lot of our used garments coming, and the beaches are filled up because it's synthetic and it's often not even good for their climate.

FL: This is great. I was wondering also, if you could talk about how the indigenous knowledge and traditional practices, what role do they play in shaping sustainable business models?

LC: If you look at the Wayuu in Colombia, in LA Vajira, next close to the city Riohacha, where we visited, they lived in Rancherias. It's a small area where you have 456, families living. The poverty is clear. They have problems getting water, although could be such a wealthy area because there's a coal mine and they have problems with water and it and it's women. It's a matriarchal society, and the women own the land, and they're in charge of their communities. But the outside communities are Colombian, and they don't have networks with Colombian authorities as easily established. So they have trouble getting water into their reservations, even though they have the right to it. But that's another story. The story that we looked at was how they made mochilas, which are crocheted bags that protect the old patterns and the old colours and the old stories and the beautiful patterns of nature around them, the animals, the Turtles and so on. They make these and this is their main income. It always has been. And the problem is that Medellin and Bogota business people will come and buy up the large quantities of bags and try to press the prices, which is still a natural business thing to do, but it's very problematic for the women, because they are used to crocheting and getting a good price. And now there's factories and. So on that make this and so they the competition is really difficult, and they they're losing their jobs, and losing the yarn and so on. And so I asked them, well, why don't you figure out how many hours you spend on a bag, and then you charge accordingly, and then you negotiate accordingly. And they just didn't understand the question. They were like: what do you mean? So, because they, and it's, it was just, I was thinking, I am such a businessperson. You guys just do this, this and this. They said, we crochet when we don't do other stuff. And they tend to the ranch rear, and they have, you know, they have goats, and they are self-sufficient with vegetables and so on. So they just crochet when they have time, and then they sell when they're done with a bag. There's a lot of pressure now because their main income from these bags is now in jeopardy. So what they try to do, and what where technology helps, is that many of their children start maybe at the University of La Guajira, where they teach entrepreneurship, and they start and have ideas of how to get tourists to come and hear about the story and look at and watch their dances and so on. So tourism is picking up in another way, and this is where also technology helps them, because they can advertise.

FL: What I wanted to ask you next was, how has the post pandemic landscape shifted opportunities or challenges for women entrepreneurs, particularly in the circular economy?

LC: Yes. The case in Japan is a case in point of how technology helps altogether to be online. And she started in 2019 and she had just started her business when Covid broke out. So, this was a time she actually used the time to think of her strategy. And then, of course, as Covid stopped and she started having meetings and her business boomed, she had new problems with sourcing and production and logistics and all of this, and then she had to rethink. But actually Covid ended up being a time to think. And it was also a time to think for for instance, Evia in the a grain by circular technology, where she they also started just before Covid, and they had some time to pick up and think about strategy. And I think at that time, they also got the intellectual property rights for the tech technology that they use to make this this upgraded spent grain. And so Covid was a time to think and the people that the women that came out on the other side, really did well. And this is what happened for the cases that I looked at. Of course, there were some cases that didn't come through and that I had connected with, but not very many. So all of these that we planned, that I planned with my colleagues, I was able to do this research. A lot of times you'll make, you know, you'll make promises, but it doesn't work out. And this happened in a few places in Japan, where I had to find this new case. And we started this in 2022. We went to Colombia right after Covid, and for these women, it was an opportunity to think and incubate and for instance, in and this is very interesting, at the Nusa Penida island in Bali, the weavers stopped weaving. And they actually lost their the weaving machines, they rested, and they had to start that up again. But, because they were self sufficient in the vegetables and so on, they didn't suffer at all during covid. But the thing is that their young people that were going to take over the traditions now want to leave the island and go to Jakarta to try new ventures. And this is a problem to sustain the traditions. And that's a big problem, yeah.

FL: Yeah, absolutely. Because if you don't give them the opportunities to thrive in their own communities, in their small, you know, villages, remote villages, then of course, they're going to go to the nearest city.

LC: Exactly. And this, of course, is harmful to women, because weaving has been their tradition and their artefacts and opportunity is lost in that sense. And also, I mean, it's not just that young people don't take it over. Also, the competition of cotton from China, for instance, and the synthetic colours for the weaving are making competitive products to these traditional products that take a long time to weave. So there are several competitive issues.

FL: Yeah, definitely. We could be talking about the impact of the pandemic for a long time. If you could give one piece of advice to a young woman considering starting a sustainable business today, what would you say?

LC: I mean, the first thing would be to to think about their own mission, so they can use this as a compass. It's going to, I mean, market shift and technologies evolve, customers, expectations continuously change. So you have to be really rooted in your purpose to be resilient and impactful. What that means is that you have to think about how you're green or eco-friendly. I mean, what is sustainability to you? Is it a circular design? Is it fair labour practices? Is it that you use materials that are regenerative? Is it that you protect authentic artisanship? Which are all cases that we have written about in the book. So you have to very firmly choose your lane and claim something, and that has to connect to how you source your partnerships and so on that it continuously have to reflect what you think sustainability is. The clarity of your purpose it doesn't just guide the strategy you have, it will attract other people. That's what you see with these women that we have studied. I mean, if you have a clear statement, your customers, your collaborators, will champion you, and they will gravitate towards that mission. And this is important. Also, an important part of the book is that you have to collaborate and find partners and supporters. You have to think about insisting on a balance between family and work and then get support from family and friends and your community.

FL: Yeah, that's a great answer. Thank you so much. Lisbeth, it's been a pleasure. Do you have anything more that you want to add?

LC: Thank you for having me. Francesca, it was so nice to talk to you. I would really like to thank my contributors: Doris Acuña Medina from University of La Guajira in Riohacha, Colombia; Djiby ANNE from Groupe Supdeco Dakar, in Senegal; Kristine Hornshøj Harper, who has her own company, Southeast Saga in Bali, Indonesia; Hanne Pico Larsen from the Tuck School of Business in Dartmouth, USA; Jacobo Ramirez, who is with me in Copenhagen Business School; Sally Shamieh, who is at ESA Business School in Beirut, Lebanon; and finally, Claudia Patricia Vèlez-Zapata, who is in the Pontifical Bolivarian University in Medellín, Colombia.

FL: And that's a wrap on today's conversation about women entrepreneurs and their experiences across the globe. A huge thanks goes to Dr Lisbeth Clausen for sharing her expertise and for shining a light on how culture and sustainability influence business practices. A full transcript of this episode is also available on our website. Big thanks also, as always, to our podcast producers, Rebecca and Tom and the team at This is Distorted for bringing this episode together. I'm Francesca Lombardo and this has been the Emerald podcast series. See you next time.