Are senior entrepreneurs less innovative than younger ones?

Senior entrepreneurship may be an option for innovation-driven countries when they are trying to increase their overall entrepreneurship rate. Research gaps are large, however, when it comes to inter-temporal comparisons of senior entrepreneurship and to the innovativeness of senior entrepreneurship across countries. This exploratory chapter is based upon GEM data and focuses on innovative entrepreneurship in innovation-driven countries. It shows that senior entrepreneurship has grown in absolute as well as in relative terms in the 15 countries studied. This increase was stronger than the increase of the share of elderly people in the total population. Consequently, in 2018, entrepreneurship is much more frequent among 55- to 64-year-olds than it was 12 years ago. Nevertheless, and from a static view, the level of senior entrepreneurship is (still) lower than its population share might signal. Second, businesses of senior entrepreneurs are neither less nor more innovative than those of younger entrepreneurs. Instead, innovative businesses are a small minority among senior entrepreneurs, too. The case study of Germany revealed that innovativeness differs between both age groups, but not in favour of one or the other group for each of the indicators. In the concluding section several policy implications are discussed.