Project Team

Principal, Risery Consulting

Kim de Laat

Postdoctoral fellow at Brock University, Department of Sociology

Meghan Hellstern

Alumni, Senior Projects Officer

Jessica Thomson

Alumni, Marketing and Communications Specialist

Heather Russek

Collaborator, Innovation Design + Futures

Why we’re doing this project

Launched in 2019 as part of the Government of Canada’s Women Entrepreneurship Strategy, the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (WEKH) is building a national network and accessible digital platform for sharing research, resources, and leading strategies. The Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship (BII+E) is working with WEKH on a suite of action-oriented research projects on entrepreneurship in Canada, supporting the development of more inclusive policies, programs, and practices across Canada’s innovation ecosystem.

As part of this suite of projects, BII+E, in collaboration with the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs (IPL), is building the first complete picture of the state of high-growth companies in Canada: the National Scale-Up Index. This includes developing a new national index of Canadian high-growth companies, quantitative assessments of federal programs designed to support Canadian scale-ups, and gap analysis of the programming available.

While the quantitative analysis in the National Scale-Up Index is thorough and extensive, by nature it is not well-placed to answer experiential questions about topics like thoughts, feelings, stresses, joys, ambitions, perceived barriers, and other questions about individual subjective experiences. To fill this research gap, BII+E is pursuing the Scaling Women-Founded Firms qualitative research project to understand the experiences of women entrepreneurs as they scale their high-growth firms, building on the quantitative findings highlighted in the National Scale-Up Index. The project objectives are to:

Understand the experiences of women entrepreneurs in Canada as they scale their high-growth firms
Identify or confirm key barriers/gaps and opportunities for further investigation and exploration

Our Approach

This project looks to gather qualitative data on the experiences of women entrepreneurs related to growing their businesses. It uses a variety of methods such as interviews and surveys to gather insights while also complementing this qualitative research with insights from the quantitative National Scale-Up Index.

This research project explores the experience of entrepreneurs with diverse gender identities including men, women, Two-Spirit, genderqueer, gender-fluid, and non-binary individuals. This project is trans-inclusive. Wherever possible this project seeks to include diverse voices and perspectives, including age, geography, sociocultural background, and other factors.

This project’s findings will be shared in a report summarizing the key findings as well as identifying potential areas for further investigation and intervention. Creative outputs such as infographics and other innovative methods of sharing information will also be considered.