Purpose: – The aim of this paper is to contribute to knowledge on innovation from a gender perspective, and to investigate how environment affects the process of innovation by women. Design/methodology/approach: – The empirical study uses a Structural Equations Model of a Partial Least Squared (PLS) technique. Data of 40 countries from around the world were collected from 2008. Findings: – Institutional environment matters for innovative activity by women. An innovative thinking is required for integrating the gender perspective in innovative milieus in order to enrich, diversify and promote stronger innovation activities, mobilising unexploited opportunities for managers in the business sector, and for policy makers in the public one. Research limitations/implications: – A new sex-disaggregated dataset will allow us to enlarge and improve upon this study. A longitudinal study would be extremely useful, but for the moment, there are no available data of this kind. Practical implications: – Policies designed to reduce the gap for women in innovation activities have to fight against gender segregation in the job market and gender differences in education and training. They must increase flexibility in the workplace, provide more help to conciliate family and working lives, and reduce the gap in family responsibilities taken on by women. Originality/value: – This paper contributes to the cross-over of knowledge between innovation and gender, and reduces the lack of information on how external factors may impact innovative behaviour by gender.

This paper investigates the linkages between pressure from stakeholders, eco‐innovation and environmental performance considering the moderating role of being a cooperative. Using survey data from 239 Spanish companies we developed a model of structural equations to verify the relationship between the variables. We show that the implementation of eco‐innovations, driven by pressure from internal stakeholders, leads to better environmental performance. In addition, our results strengthen previous empirical evidence about the compromise of cooperatives with the community, workers, and the environment: they are influenced by both internal and external stakeholders in the implementation of eco‐innovations, while limited liability companies are influenced only by internal stakeholders.

The increase in the weight of social entrepreneurship (SE) in the economy has driven the increase in research on the subject. Within the set of approaches developed by scholars to analyse SE, the institutional approach has recently acquired greater relevance. Following this research trend, this article seeks to expand the empirical research on SE by focusing on the informal factors that are less studied in the literature and using a cross-national base. Using the New Institutional Economics and partial least squares–structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), our findings show the influence of cultural context on the SE dimension. In addition, this influence occurs through two groups of variables led by social capital and corporate social responsibility, although their impacts show opposite signs. These factors have important implications for policy makers in charge of fostering SE development.