Technology use, and impacts of patenting among women-owned businesses

Women continue to contribute vitally to the economy, and those contributions have long included innovation and technology. Recently, Statistics Canada released two studies on patent performance and technology adoption by women-owned businesses in Canada.

What follows are the highlights of those two studies, along with some recent data from the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions (CSBC) to see where technology adoption is headed in the near future.

Women-owned businesses that patent have higher survival rates, lower revenue growth, higher profitability compared with other businesses that patent

A new study shows that women-owned businesses that patent had a higher five-year survival rate—a difference of 0.8 percentage points compared with men-owned businesses, and 8.0 percentage points compared with businesses where the gender of ownership cannot be assigned.

The study, based on data from the Canadian Patent Research Database and the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database on firms active from 2001 to 2014, also found that two years after filing a patent, women-owned businesses had an annual growth rate that was 9.3 percentage points lower than men-owned businesses.

Conversely, women-owned businesses, though typically smaller and less likely to perform research and development, were more likely to be profitable than men-owned businesses (+7.1 percentage points). Notably, women-owned firms that applied for patents were less likely to experience an exit through an acquisition or merger.

One-third of women-owned businesses use advanced technologies, while nearly one in eight use emerging technologies

One-third (33.9%) of women-owned businesses used at least one advanced technology, according to findings in a study released in the summer of 2024 using 2017 and 2019 data from the Survey of Innovation and Business Strategy and the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database.

Among advanced technology subcategories, they were likeliest to use business intelligence technologies (18.2%) , followed by design or information control technologies (10.5%), and material handling, supply chain or logistics technologies (9.5%).

Close to one in eight women-owned businesses used at least one emerging technology from 2017 to 2019. The most common subcategory was Integrated Internet of Things systems (i.e., a network of physical devices, vehicles or objects embedded with technology) (8.4%), followed by miscellaneous other types (2.3%). The share of women-owned businesses using artificial intelligence  was 1.7%, less than half of that among men-owned businesses.

Cloud technologies, security and artificial intelligence software tops among technology types; financing a top challenge

In the second quarter of 2024, the CSBC asked businesses questions about future technology adoption and incorporation, as well as challenges faced in doing so, and reasons for not doing so.

Among businesses majority-owned by women which planned to adopt or incorporate technologies over the next 12 months, the most common types reported were cloud computing (14.0%), security software tools (12.3%), software using artificial intelligence (11.7%) and collaboration tools (9.8%).

There were a variety of answers when it came to challenges faced. For example, around one in five businesses said it would be extremely challenging either to access internal financing to invest in new technologies (18.1%) or external financing to support the implementation of new technologies or update pre-existing ones (20.4%).

About the same proportion said it would be somewhat challenging to retain employees with skills to use new technologies and processes (19.3%) or reorient business strategy and processes (18.5%). In contrast, nearly one-quarter of businesses (22.7%) said it would not be at all challenging to find suitable hardware or software vendors.

Among businesses majority-owned by women which did not plan to adopt or incorporate any digital technologies over the next 12 months, more than 2 in 5 businesses (42.0%) said they did not need them, while 1 in 10 (9.9%) had already adopted them. About one in five (19.7%) said they did not have the financial resources.