Finding purpose in later life : motivations and intentions in senior entrepreneurship

Abstract

The importance of senior entrepreneurship is attracting increasing attention from scholars and policymakers. This trend is driven by several factors, including longer life expectancy, reduced retirement pensions, and enhanced well-being in older age, which allow individuals to stay active in the workplace until later in life. While some studies have explored senior entrepreneurship, the field remains underdeveloped with several gaps yet to be addressed. One such gap concerns the intentions and motivations of senior entrepreneurs, which are plausibly different from those of younger entrepreneurs, but which are not yet adequately understood. In this study, we address this gap by exploring the motivations and intentions underlying older individuals’ decisions to pursue senior entrepreneurship. We build on earlier work that (1) proposed a conceptual framework that distinguished motivation and intentions as separate parts of a complex process while recognizing their interconnections, and (2) presented initial findings from an empirical qualitative study involving 28 interviewees (14 senior and 14 younger entrepreneurs) that was conducted to explore the proposed framework. The above-mentioned papers were limited by their conceptual and preliminary nature. In this study, we address those limitations by presenting the completed empirical analysis, on the basis of which we propose a refined conceptual framework. We identified four themes, namely: (i) ‘Autonomy and Aspirations’, which indicates that senior entrepreneurs value autonomy more than their younger counterparts; (ii) ‘EI and Trigger Events’, which suggest that senior entrepreneurs are more likely than younger ones to decide to start a business as a consequence of a trigger event; (iii) ‘Hierarchy of Constructs’, which indicates that the constructs in this research influence entrepreneurial action among seniors in a hierarchical manner; and (iv) ‘Entrepreneurship as ‘Therapy’’, which reveals that 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’). We contribute to the senior entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing and refining a comprehensive conceptual model of intentions and motivation. In so doing, we reveal insights on the complex journeys of senior individuals who decide to become entrepreneurs by shedding light not only the different roles played by motivations and intentions, but also on the way they relate to one another in the senior entrepreneurial journey.