Senior entrepreneurship: global mapping of supporting initiatives and programmes

Senior entrepreneurship allows for prolonging the value of human and social capital accumulated over older individuals’ lifetime. Additionally, it contributes to individuals’ quality of life, helps mitigate the rise in public pension costs and has a potential positive impact on economic growth. Even though senior entrepreneurship has been recognized as a relevant topic by researchers and policymakers, scientific literature and technical reports still lack examples of in-the-field practical initiatives supporting this specific group of entrepreneurs. In this chapter we identify and review existing initiatives supporting senior entrepreneurs across a wide set of regions in the world (N = 74). These initiatives were organized according to a number of dimensions drawn from the literature and by adapting a framework designed by Michie et al. (2011) in order to generate discussion about existing support and to suggest future interventions and research on the topic. Our results show that although a reduced number of initiatives (N = 23) are mentioned in the literature, a significant number (N = 10) are no longer active. We contribute by identifying and analysing 51 initiatives that are new to the literature. According to our findings, most of the existing initiatives assessed are based on information provision and training; there is a lack of initiatives providing funding and scarcity of support focusing on specific groups within senior entrepreneurs (such as retirees and unemployed). Supporting initiatives are polarized in the United States and reached a peak in 2016. The chapter discusses opportunities for researchers, practitioners and policymakers that emerge from the present assessment.