Greetings from the Melbourne, Australia, the site of the 51^st International Council for Small Business (ICSB) World Conference.  We have over 450 delegates attending from approximately 50 countries.  The theme of the conference is “unique solutions for unique environments” and the role of women in the entrepreneurial economy has been a very important track.  

My job was to deliver one of the keynotes, and while I talked about entrepreneurship education, I used the theme of “uniqueness” to connect all our work on women's entrepreneurship.  It seemed to work and the conversation has continued across the rest of the conference days.  

I'm fascinated by the fact that so many countries are exploring the same kind of questions on this topic.  While we've felt that way with the participants of the Diana International (www.esbri.se) project, there are so many more conversations to connect so we can learn from each other.  One of the great elements about the ICSB conference is not only the international nature, but also the fact that it truly is a place where academics, practitioners, and policy people come to meet and learn.  Some of the themes we all agreed were important included the finance gap (the reality and the perception) that people are concerned about in most countries.  While we talked about the role (or lack thereof) for banks, the conversation about angels was quite strong.  In one of the workshops I asked the audience how many of them (largely female in the room at the time) had ever invested in a woman business owner.  I had almost no takers. 

One of the other themes that kept appearing and discussed from very different social, political, and economic environments was the idea of training programs limited to or targeted to only women.  Lois Stevenson from Canada presented a fascinating and quite complete model of one approach to entrepreneurial training for women.  It reminded me of the work that Mary Godwyn did on Women's Business Centers in the U.S.

All in all, a great conference.