Neural Networks to Determine the Relationships Between Business Innovation and Gender Aspects

Abstract

Gender aspects of management, innovation and entrepreneurship are gaining more and more importance as cross-cutting issues for researchers, practitioners and decision makers. Extant literature pays a growing attention to the hypothesis that there exists a correlation between the gender diversity of corporate boards of directors and the business attitude to innovation. In this paper we introduce a working framework to test the aforementioned hypothesis and to examine the correlation between board diversity and innovation perception of a business. This framework is based on correlation computation and feed-forward neural networks, and it is used to evaluate whether the gender component may be used to predict the innovation perception of a business. First results about three different economic scenarios are reported and discussed.