Constituent Components of Rural Women's Microenterprise Ecosystem; Study in Guilan and Mazandaran provinces

In recent decade, improving of business ecosystem has attracted the attention of policy-makers. In the research area, although some studies appraised efficacious factors on development of country's business ecosystem in its general meaning, its identification and conceptualization in specific subject areas have been neglected. In this regard, the current exploratory study has been conducted in order to identification and explanation of constituent components of rural women's enterprise ecosystem in Guilan and Mazandaran provinces. Research sample individuals have been selected in terms of non-probability sampling. The qualitative data were collected by conducting detailed semi-structured interviews to obtain theoretical saturation, and then analyzed through applying ATLAS.ti software. Finding of this section categorized the conceptual emergent codes from detailed interviews with 24 key informants into 9 super-families of constituent components of rural woman's enterprise ecosystem. Consequently, applying a researcher-made questionnaire, the 9 emergent categories were reciprocally compared in the hierarchical analysis process with the use of Super Decision software. Findings showed rural woman's enterprise ecosystem has different entity, combination and priorities in comparison to large-scale industrial enterprises and even small rural enterprises controlled by men. Among resulting conceptual categories, market condition; government's main strategies and politics; regulations; physical and biological infrastructures had the highest weights respectively, with a considerable interval from the other components, implying on their priorities and attention necessity in supportive projects for rural women's regional enterprises.