Baby boom entrepreneurs: our way out of recession?

19th June 2009

It’s an interesting thought: there are more, older entrepreneurs than there are younger ones.  The average age of a technology entrepreneur is 39, not 19.  While we might think about entrepreneurs as being young, dynamic risk-takers, in actual fact, the reverse is true.  “Mature” entrepreneurs are more likely to have the social and the financial capital that leads them to build secure businesses. 

According to the Kauffman Foundation’s latest research project, the logical conclusion is that it is older entrepreneurs who will pull the US economy out of recession.  If it is true that this group of entrepreneurs that will drive growth in the future, then more surely should be done to promote the transition from employment to entrepreneurship and, in the current climate, from redundancy to entrepreneurship. 

So what evidence is there? Unfortunately, comparative statistics are relatively thin on the ground across the world and their role in generating wealth in the world economy is not well understood.  There is an inevitably noisier emphasis on young people yet, of the growth-oriented entrepreneurs surveyed in Delta Economics’s December 2008 study, just 2.5% were under the age of 30 while over 30% were over the age of 50. 

And while actual turnover growth was significantly higher in the youngest generation, turnover per employee was two and a half times higher amongst the older group of entrepreneurs.  In other words, although older entrepreneurs may not be making as much money, they are turning it into productivity – that is, wealth.

This should be music to the ears of the campaigns to support older entrepreneurs elsewhere across the world since their client group tends not to pursue the public gaze, unlike their younger counterparts.  PRIME (the Prince’s Initiative for Mature Entrepreneurs) states that the over 50’s are a “forgotten generation” – maybe the Kauffman and the Delta research can reignite the debate!