Ricerc@Sapienza

Starting from the assumption that women entrepreneurs are relevant developers of the corporate business in small and microenterprises, the main purpose of this chapter is to propose a literature analysis discovering how relational capital influences to the first stage of women enterprises. Thus, a literature searches on Scopus has been conducted to expand the international literature on the connection between gender studies and relational capital as significant intangible assets. In this way, evidence proposed are directed to understand the debate on gender and relational capital.

This paper aims at analysing women’s business around Europe and Extra-Europe countries to draw the current
scenario and to create a theoretical background to investigate in our future research which is the contribution of relational
dimension as intangible asset to the born of small and medium women’s businesses. Building similarities, differences and
changes, this analysis has been conducted in Southern European Country (Italy), Nordic country (Finland) and Southerneastern

This paper aims at analysing how relational capital (RC) contributes to the born of women enterprises in Italian small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In this way, this research is supported by a qualitative research methodology using a multiple case study (Yin 2009) comparing a small female enterprise and a small man enterprise to point out their characteristics and differences. Thus, the paper applies the CAOS model of micro-entrepreneurship by Paoloni (2011).