Motivations and intentions underlying decisions to pursue senior entrepreneurship

Abstract

The relevance of senior entrepreneurship to scholars and policymakers has grown steadily in recent years. This is the result of various factors including an increase in life expectancy, a decrease in retirement pensions, and improvements in wellbeing at older ages which enable people to remain active and productive for longer. Although some research has been carried out on senior entrepreneurship, this is still a nascent area of study where various gaps exist. One of these gaps concerns the intentions and motivations of senior entrepreneurs. In this study, we aim to address this gap by exploring the motivations and intentions underlying older individuals’ decisions to pursue senior entrepreneurship. We build on our earlier work that proposed a conceptual framework which delineated motivation and intentions as separate parts of a complex process while acknowledging their mutual interconnections. The abovementioned paper addressed various shortcomings of earlier literature but was limited by its conceptual nature. In this study we begin to address that limitation by presenting preliminary empirical findings from semi-structured interviews that we conducted with 28 entrepreneurs. These indicate that senior entrepreneurs are more likely to decide to start a business as a consequence of a trigger event than their younger counterparts. Moreover, some senior entrepreneurs consider entrepreneurship as a form of therapy that enables them to deal with distressful events (a phenomenon that we refer to as ‘entrepreneurapy’), and they tend to adjust their success aspirations to align with their lifestyles and autonomy preferences. We contribute to the senior entrepreneurship literature by empirically exploring a comprehensive conceptual model of intentions and motivation, which in turn had built on and extended transferrable theory from psychology and entrepreneurship, namely the theory of planned behaviour, the entrepreneurial event model, and self-determination theory. In so doing, we reveal insights on the complex journeys of senior individuals who decide to become entrepreneurs.