Abstract:

Innovation is widely promoted as a route to stronger performance in entrepreneurial small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), yet innovation can also generate organisational strain and performance penalties when pursued beyond a feasible threshold. Drawing on organisational slack theory and a gendered constraints lens, this paper develops the concept of excessive innovation in Bangladesh and theorises an inverted U-shaped relationship between innovation intensity and entrepreneurial SME performance. Focusing on Bangladesh as a Global South context, we argue that performance benefits may diminish and reverse when innovation intensity exceeds firms’ coordination capacity and resource buffers, and that this turning point may differ for women-led entrepreneurial SMEs when gendered constraints in finance, legitimacy, and business networks raise the marginal costs of sustaining high-intensity innovation. Using open-access secondary data from two waves of the World Bank Enterprise Survey for Bangladesh (2013 and 2022), matched with time-varying national indicators of governance quality and gender inequality, the study tests whether innovation intensity exhibits a performance-maximising threshold and whether the curve varies by gender and institutional conditions. The paper contributes by identifying when innovation stops paying off—and for whom—supporting more impact-oriented and inclusion-sensitive approaches to innovation policy for entrepreneurial SMEs in Bangladesh and comparable Global South economies.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: Entrepreneurship

Keywords: International entrepreneurship;Female entrepreneurs;Entrepreneurship in emerging markets

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Mr. Iqbal Hossain Moral