| Abstract [eng] |
This thesis explores how women entrepreneurs in Lithuania and Georgia use digital and AI-enabled products to overcome institutional and cultural barriers and to develop innovative, internationally oriented business practices. Based on 27 semi-structured interviews analysed using qualitative thematic analysis in MAXQDA 24, the findings show that digital and AI tools function as everyday adaptive infrastructure rather than innovation projects, solving concrete problems of cost, time, expertise, visibility, and legitimacy under conditions where formal institutional support is fragmented or inaccessible. Participants combined digital platforms, AI systems, personal networks, and improvisational strategies into layered adaptive ecosystems, with Lithuanian participants more often using these tools for optimisation and structured growth and Georgian participants using them as survival-oriented resource compensation under unstable conditions. The thesis develops three connected theoretical concepts grounded in the data - Adaptive Digital Compensation, AI-Enabled Entrepreneurial Bricolage, and Internationalisation-as-Escape - which together integrate institutional theory, digital entrepreneurship, dynamic capabilities, and bricolage into a unified analytical framework. The central argument is that the main challenge facing women entrepreneurs in these contexts is not access to digital technologies but how to use them meaningfully under different institutional conditions, and that the women interviewed are already doing this work pragmatically, creatively, and often without adequate institutional support. |
