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Mature age or older entrepreneurship is an understudied but important area of research due to the ageing population and changing demographics in society. The purpose of this study is to review the literature about older entrepreneurship to understand the gaps and areas that need more attention.

A systematic literature review was undertaken and then the content was analyzed according to main themes. The key issues currently discussed about older entrepreneurship are stated, which leads to a number of future research suggestions.

The findings involve the need to take more care in how to define and conceptualize older entrepreneurship and to undertake more studies that have an older sample in general entrepreneurship research.

The systematic literature review highlights the gaps in the literature about older entrepreneurs that need to be addressed in future research.

The paper provides some suggestions about how older people can be more involved in entrepreneurship.

This study contributes to the emerging literature about older entrepreneurship by providing an overview and directions for the future.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the entrepreneurial learning and support needs of older unemployed, highlighting the barriers that need to be addressed, and to explore the impact of a tailored entrepreneurship training programme.

An interpretivist philosophical standpoint is adopted with an action research approach to engage key informants to design, implement and evaluate the programme. Focus groups and interviews with 132 older unemployed individuals and 50 stakeholders across six countries were conducted as well as pre- and post-programme evaluations and surveys with 55 programme participants across three countries.

This research provides a deeper understanding of the entrepreneurial learning and support needs of older unemployed.

The small sample size of participants measured using a hybrid measure of ESE is a limitation.

For entrepreneurship educators, the components of designing and delivering an entrepreneurship programme for older unemployed are identified. For enterprise and unemployment support agencies, it provides evidence of the initial and ongoing support needs for starting and running a business in later life.

A framework specific to older unemployed individuals turning towards self-employment or entrepreneurship is proposed and tested in this paper. The framework proposes that individual and contextual antecedents influence the decision to become self-employed in later life and that the training, support and entrepreneurial experience helps to overcome barriers and shapes individual and societal outcomes.

This study investigates how older women linguists' careers developed and led to self-employment, and this not necessarily in a linear career stage fashion. The focus is on understanding the factors that influence older women to become or continue into an entrepreneurship lifestyle, beyond economic reasons.

The research questions that guided this research are: (1) How have women linguists' careers developed at older or older old age? and (2) Which factors influenced women linguists' decision to become or continue as self-employed at older or older old age? This study is based on semi-structure interviews and short narratives written by ten informants about their late-career motivations and decisions. To get a holistic view of career development of women linguistics at an older age, the approach adopted in this study is explorative and interpretive, where the theoretical perspective supporting this approach derives mainly from career and wellbeing theories.

The authors’ findings signal that these self-employed older women's careers develop along parallel, explorative or expertise directions. The factors which appear to influence these women's decision to continue their careers as entrepreneurs include economic reasons (having), clearly. They also importantly point to other themes surrounding wellbeing including social relations (loving), self-realization and lifelong learning (being), entrepreneurship as a life style (acting) and meaningful extension of one's career (belonging).

This paper discusses how older women entrepreneurs may experience wellbeing and careers integrated together. It challenges the common notion of “career” as a one-time, linear “choice”, and instead shows how older women's entrepreneurship is a complex phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the developing literature on entrepreneurship and identity by exploring the multidimensionality of older (50+) British women entrepreneurs’ identity. By using positionality as a lens, greater insight into the complexity of the lived multiple identities of older women entrepreneurs is explored.

A total of 12 in-depth qualitative interviews took place throughout the UK seeking to capture the various experiences of how older women engage with intersecting discourses surrounding enterprise culture and ageing whilst constructing their identities.

Overall, findings evidence the outcomes of these intersecting dimensions are largely positive and demonstrate the life enhancing benefits of these overlaps. Whilst tension was evidenced between age and how these women entrepreneurs perceive their entrepreneurial identities, as well as some constraints between identity as “mother” and “entrepreneur”, overall synergy was found between the intersection of older women entrepreneurs’ social identities and their entrepreneurial identity. It must be noted, however, that this synergy was heavily reliant on context and stage of life for these women.

This paper challenges the traditional discourse of entrepreneurship, which produces a homogenous view of entrepreneurs and omits key historical and social variables in the process of identity formation. The current paper adds to increasing calls to develop more sophisticated ways of measuring and understanding entrepreneurship and its impacts. The authors echo calls throughout the most recent literature to move away from the agency agenda and pursue lines of enquiry that examine entrepreneurship as a process in contexts that are underpinned by both agency and external factors.

The aim of this article is to discuss how age and entrepreneurship interact in the specific case of older (50+) entrepreneurs. Building on theories on entrepreneurship and theories on age and aging, the authors’ focus is on how such entrepreneurs relate to the building and running of a business organization. The authors discuss how entrepreneurship among the elderly plays out and how older entrepreneurs relate to the narratives on both age and entrepreneurship.

This research comprises quantitative as well as qualitative studies. The authors show that qualitative methods that unfold the process over time are necessary and essential to fully understand how and why entrepreneurs start their own business and/or continue to run it at older ages.

The authors find that the choice to become an entrepreneur at the age of 50+ (or to stay as one) is not a goal in itself, becoming an entrepreneur is a means to stay active in the labor market.

The study findings add to entrepreneurship theory by insights on the link between entrepreneurship and the labor market where the authors argue that becoming an entrepreneur at ages 50+ might be more a question of choice of organizational form than a question on a way of living or occupation. The authors also contribute to theories on age by showing that entrepreneurs aged 50+ choose entrepreneurship as a means to be able to stay in the labor market.

The objective of this paper is to examine the potential for and barriers to older enterprise as well as the role and contribution of specific enterprise support policy, focusing in particular on socially disadvantaged older people.

The paper takes the form of a single case study of the Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise (PRIME) with multiple data sources, including a synthesis of current literature, PRIME self‐evaluation reports, interviews with PRIME personnel and results of a recent survey of 283 individuals who had contacted PRIME for enterprise advice and support.

The paper finds that, with respect to older enterprise support policy, the tentative results presented in this study seem encouraging in terms of a positive social and economic role for older enterprise support work. However, due to the limitations of the data, a number of questions need additional clarification in future research. Longitudinal research designs are required to investigate in more detail the additional social benefits generated by older enterprise support as well as concerns regarding deadweight and over‐investment.

The paper brings the experience of enterprise support practitioners into the debate about older entrepreneurship.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO, 2015), in the next 30 years, the world population will age rapidly, so that in the middle of the twenty-first century those people who are over 60 years of age will be double that at the beginning of the century. Between 2015 and 2050, the world population with more than 60 years of age will increase from 900 million to 2,000 million.

Faced with this demographic change experienced by the world population, formulas are increasingly being raised that make active aging possible, opening possibilities for self-realization and personal and professional growth until the end of life. This is one of the reasons why more and more scholars and practitioners are focusing on the value of entrepreneurship in older adults and the programs that encourage it.

This chapter aims to reflect on what leads the group of so-called senior entrepreneurs to start a new work–life based on entrepreneurship or self-employment, as well as discuss some myths of entrepreneurship. To what extent we must consider the firm performance as a variable on which the decision can be taken is pivoted. Entrepreneurship is a complex issue, and although it is true that it has been strongly analyzed both academically and professionally by different generations of young people, the behavior of senior entrepreneurs, a population group that is becoming increasingly important sociologically and economically, has barely been studied.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight important aspects of adopting a lifelong learning mindset as a way to improve entrepreneurial employability and self-employment capabilities among older workers, and to examine their practicality in enterprise services.

This paper takes a two-method research approach that synthesizes an original conceptual framework based on current gerontological and work psychology literature with qualitative organizational case study in the Israeli labor market.

The process of lifelong learning and accumulation of employability underpins a fulfilling career in self-employment later in life, through continuous self-acquisition of necessary knowledge and complementary skills. Adopting a lifelong learning mindset may contribute to older workers developing lifelong employability by self-realizing their meaningful life wisdom alongside becoming lifelong learners, and consequently, by becoming protean career owners capable of acquiring entrepreneurial competencies and skills. Program analysis of social and business enterprises established in Israel to meet the demand for the acquisition of later life skills demonstrates the various ways in which they play a role in supporting this process.

The need for future research and practice on the conceptual framework presented in this paper is analyzed and discussed in the Israeli context.

This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on third-age entrepreneurship, by conceptually linking the core concept of lifelong learning to entrepreneurial employability, and demonstrating its application in the Israeli work culture.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges of older self-employed workers in the creative industries and ways of dealing with these challenges. This is important in the light of the aging population and the increase in entrepreneurship among older workers.

In total, 43 older self-employed creatives in the Netherlands were interviewed by telephone. Once the data were transcribed, content analysis was conducted.

The findings reveal that older self-employed creatives are often forced into self-employment, experiencing a vicious circle that pushes them away from the creative industries. They have to deal with multiple identities. Successful older self-employed creatives dealt with these challenges by creating synergies between their identities, focussing on their strengths and using their existing networks. They also stressed the transferability of their skills and knowledge.

Older self-employed creatives have to deal with some specific challenges. Although these challenges are difficult to deal with, some successful strategies emerged.

Older self-employed creatives are an under-researched group of workers. Other industries can learn from the success stories of older entrepreneurs in the creative industries.