Understanding the older entrepreneur: Comparing Third Age and Prime Age entrepreneurs in Finland

By Teemu Kautonen. International Journal of Business Science and Applied Management, 2008

188 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper responds to the need for more data on the topical issue of older entrepreneurship by comparing Third Age (50+ years) and Prime Age (20-49 years) entrepreneurs in Finland. The data comprises responses from 839 small firms which were established 2000-2006. The fact that 16% of these firms were founded by individuals aged 50 or over indicates that older entrepreneurship is not a marginal issue, even though the start-up rate in the Third Age population was found to be slightly less than half of that in the Prime Age cohort. Further, the findings point to the need for more empirical, especially qualitative, research on issues related to the social and cultural perceptions of old age and gender as well as different 'pull' motivations leading to entrepreneurship at an older age, which were found to clearly dominate over 'push' motives in this context.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/097ddeb85f0e12abeca080c0992aa895726eb635

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

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Citations in the corpus

Influence of work history on entrepreneurial intentions in ‘prime age’ and ‘third age’: A preliminary study (2010, background): “…cohort as a contextual variable by providing a comparison between ‘prime age’ (20–49 years) and ‘third age’ (50–64 years) individuals (Hart et al., 2004; Kautonen, 2008), that is, between individuals who are in their early or mid-career compared with those in their late career who are still below…”
Demographic factors, family background and prior self-employment on entrepreneurial intention - Vietnamese business students are different: why? (2018, background): “This finding is inconsistent with many previous studies which confirm that age is negatively associated with entrepreneurial intention (Curran and Blackburn, 2001; Weber and Schaper, 2004; Levesque and Minniti, 2006; Kautonen, 2008; Hatak et al., 2015).”
Born to be alive? The survival of innovative and non-innovative French micro-start-ups (2014, result): “This choice is in line with the literature studying the relationship between the age of the entrepreneur and the creation of its enterprise (Bönte et al. , 2009; Kautonen, 2008).”
Entrepreneurial intentions in the third age: the impact of perceived age norms (2011, background): “The ‘‘pull’’ argumentation suggests that there will be growing numbers of (early) retirees with the experience, know-how and financial means for entrepreneurship (Baucus and Human 1994; Singh and DeNoble 2003) who may wish to remain economically active in order to maintain a lifestyle (Walker and We”