Last year for women’s history month, I highlighted remarkable women. This year I rather look ahead, which is exactly the theme for 2025 “Moving Forward Together.” How and where to move forward is an individual choice— by a woman or girl, of any age. My recent project looking at opportunities for women —anywhere, anytime, anyplace—is partially captured here.
I’m presenting about women’s opportunities in late March for Montana World Affairs. In developing the session, myself and a brilliant researcher Prof. Wendy Bradley got together in early January, having profiled several of her research papers across a previous two-year period. I rummaged through her research, and unearthed common threads and opportunities for women as entrepreneurs, and specifically in tech. This is one segment of my entire presentation, but really important and insightful. Initially, she was to join me on a panel, but UM deferred their conference, thus the workaround of flying solo on the program..
The video above “Women’s Opportunities” jumps into these ideas. A long-form version will be available later.
“...[On the one hand, internationalization might help small firms survive in these nascent digital markets, but on the other hand, it might harm long-term innovation because it’s concentrating these technological capabilities in just a few firms. It makes it harder for nations to develop independent technological capabilities and it’s creating dependence potentially on foreign digital infrastructure or standards if these firms are innovating and going abroad. ”
reflections of the work from 2024-25, and beyond
from the video
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If you think about those same takeaways for AI, what does that mean? It means that superstar firms have big data advantages that are creating nearly insurmountable barriers for smaller firms. And so even though smaller firms can go international and they can do that as a survival strategy, this trend that we find in the Metaverse, if it exists in AI, it might actually reinforce superstar firms is dominance.
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I think that we will do a lot of research as scholars on innovation, competition, AI replacing jobs, sciences and supply chains. But I think that the very subtle and really economically important impact might be in creative industries.
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if it's true that born digital firms can effectively compete at smaller scales, this would be a great entry point for female entrepreneurs who face barriers to traditional means of accessing capital. And if there are opportunities to compete with superstar firms by being a niche player or reaching global markets, this could also benefit female entrepreneurs.
A playlist
From Women’s History 2024
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