Entrepreneurship, age, and the lifespan: Taking stock and avenues for future research

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is deeply shaped by age, influencing who enters, how ventures perform, and whether entrepreneurs persist. Youth offers resilience and innovation yet is constrained by limited resources; midlife combines strong skills and experience with tensions around financial security and competing demands; later life brings accumulated expertise and networks but also ageist barriers. This editorial synthesizes a decade of research and the five articles in this special issue, identifying ten themes that illuminate the age-entrepreneurship relationship. We distill key insights and outline future research avenues, underscoring the wealth of exciting topics and the need for nuanced understanding of entrepreneurship across the lifespan.