Senior Entrepreneurship in the Longevity Economy

 American senior entrepreneur Katherine Wells first encountered care as a family member. Her mother, who had Alzheimer’s disease, moved into a memory-care facility, while her father entered assisted living. Wells found herself on the user side of the care system. Again and again, she watched information break down between multiple service providers and the family, with important changes failing to reach the people who needed to know in time.[1][2]

Wells had spent more than 20 years working in software and marketing. She did not treat the recurring frustrations of care as inconveniences that families simply had to endure. After observing facilities directly and looking closely at what staff and users went through, she founded Serenity Engage in 2019, a digital platform designed to improve communication and care coordination between families and care providers. In 2022, at age 55, she emphasized that she was proud to be a woman who had started her first company after 50.[3] A user had become an entrepreneur.

The Longevity Economy has long been explained largely in terms of older adults’ consumption and demand for care. Population aging is expanding markets for healthcare and caregiving, housing and finance, mobility and technology. But demand is not the only thing a longevity society accumulates. As people live and work longer, they also build up experience, expertise, relationships, and judgment.

Should that accumulated experience disappear at retirement, or can it become a resource for building new companies and industries?

This article starts by looking at older adults in the Longevity Economy not only as consumers and users, but also as entrepreneurs and innovators.

1. How Far Can the Role of Older Adults Expand in the Longevity Economy?

The concept of the Longevity Economy began with the recognition of the enormous purchasing power of people aged 50 and over. The discussion later expanded beyond healthcare and caregiving to encompass housing, finance, mobility, tourism, education, technology, and other industries being reshaped as people live longer.[4]

But if we see older adults only as consumers, we see only the consumption side of the Longevity Economy. Products and services have to work in real life, and that requires input from the people who use them. Paradoxically, older adults are beginning to appear in Longevity Economy innovation not only as consumers, but as users, participants in real-world testing, and producers of services. They can also define problems they have faced themselves, bring together the people, technologies, and capital needed to address them, and turn products and services into businesses.

If entrepreneurship is understood merely as a spirit of challenge or a mindset, senior entrepreneurship can easily be reduced to the slogan that “it is never too late to try.”

Entrepreneurship is a practice: identifying problems and opportunities that remain unresolved in the real world, recombining resources such as people, technology, knowledge, and capital to create solutions, and turning those solutions into actual products, services, and businesses.

Senior entrepreneurship can be understood in the same way. What matters is that the experience, expertise, relationships, and judgment accumulated over a long life and career are converted into ventures that solve real problems. In the Longevity Economy, older adults can move from recipients of social support to consumers, from consumers to users and co-designers, from co-developers to entrepreneurs and innovators.

2. From Wisdom Capital to Innovation Capital

What, exactly, accumulates over a long life and career?

Vasconcelos (2018) described the knowledge and expertise accumulated by older workers as an organization’s wisdom capital. The study is largely conceptual, but it challenges the habit of seeing older workers mainly as a cost or a productivity problem and asks organizations to treat knowledge and know-how built over many years as assets they can use.[5]

Wisdom here means more than simply knowing a great deal. Someone who has worked in the same industry for many years learns what actually works in practice, which failed approaches should be abandoned and which deserve another attempt, and how people and organizations respond in ways that no manual records. Over time, professional knowledge, hands-on practice, networks, memories of trial and error, judgment, and an eye for problems all accumulate.

Entrepreneurship research also confirms the importance of experience. Azoulay, Jones, Kim and Miranda (2020), combining U.S. administrative data on firms, workers, and business owners, analyzed founders’ ages and performance. The average founding age among the founders of the fastest-growing 0.1 percent of new ventures was 45, and a track record in the same industry was strongly associated with entrepreneurial success.[6] These findings should not be read to mean that older adults are simply better entrepreneurs. Performance tracked industry experience more closely than age. Kautonen (2013), writing for the OECD, likewise argued that senior entrepreneurship should not be confined to labor-market re-entry or necessity self-employment, and pointed to the potential for using older adults’ human capital in innovative startups.[7] Recent Korean research has also begun to interpret middle-aged entrepreneurs as “experience-based innovators.”[8]

But wisdom capital does not automatically produce innovation. Experience is an asset, yet if it is not open to new problems and technologies, it can also become a source of path dependence.

The term innovation capital has already been used in the literature on intellectual capital and innovation management.[9] In this article, I apply it to the Longevity Economy and senior entrepreneurship: the accumulated experience, expertise, networks, and judgment of older adults once they connect with new technologies, people, capital, and markets and can be turned into products, services, and companies.

Wisdom capital is an accumulated asset. Innovation capital is that asset beginning to move.

At the core of innovation capital is entrepreneurial practice: redefining a problem, connecting the people and technologies required, combining resources, experimenting, taking risks, and turning an idea into a business in the real market.

American nurse-turned-entrepreneur Emma Soy worked as a nurse for more than 30 years before founding Gentle Shepherd Care in 2019. After decades of caring for older adults and their families, she came to see a problem in conventional elder care: it often focused on assistance with daily living and medication management without sufficiently addressing an individual’s quality of life and independence.[10]

Soy brought decades of clinical experience with patients and families, judgment about where gaps in care emerge, and an understanding of how medical and care services actually work on the ground. That was wisdom capital. She turned that understanding into a home-care service model and built it into a business with its own organization and customers. Wisdom capital had begun to work as innovation capital.

A longevity society contains a paradox. People live longer and build up knowledge and skills for longer, yet many organizations and institutions are still designed on the assumption that people will leave the labor market and their organizations at a certain age. Seen through the lens of senior entrepreneurship, retirement becomes the point at which accumulated wisdom moves into new companies and industries.

3. Global Trends in Senior Entrepreneurship

When people hear “senior entrepreneurship,” they may first think of necessity self-employment after retirement. Yet across a number of countries, people in their 50s, 60s, and beyond are turning long careers and lived experience into products, services, platforms, and organizations. These senior entrepreneurs are not simply repeating what they did before.

3.1. Senior Entrepreneurs in the United States

The 50+ entrepreneurs profiled by AARP in March 2026 show different forms of innovation across technology, manufacturing, and consumer goods.[11] American senior technology entrepreneur Jim Pollock drew on his background as an electrical and software engineer and in multiple startups to co-found LumenAstra in his 60s. The company is commercializing technology for noninvasive measurement of brain temperature. Pollock’s wisdom capital took the form of commercialization judgment: the ability to recognize which research technologies could become real products and reach the market.

American materials and product-development specialist Patty Ferreira founded Silvis Materials after 50 and developed a biodegradable binder made from wood cellulose. Here, innovation was made practical by years in the field: knowing what performance and process requirements an industrial material would actually have to meet before it could replace an incumbent product.[11]

American cosmetics specialist Liz Martin created MYNE Beauty at 58 after 30 years in product development. She designed not only formulations for mature skin but also large-print labels and a magnifying mirror. Her dual perspective—as an industry expert and as a 50+ consumer herself—led to innovation in the user experience.[11]

3.2. Senior Entrepreneurs in Korea

Korea had an established-business ownership rate of nearly 25 percent among people aged 50–64 in the OECD’s 2018–2022 comparison, a very high level. Because this figure also reflects Korea’s high rate of self-employment, however, it should not be interpreted as evidence that innovative senior entrepreneurship is equally widespread.[12]

Against this background, Korean senior technology entrepreneur Tai-Myoung Chung, a software professor at Sungkyunkwan University, offers a different possibility. After a long career researching software and information security, he founded HippoT&C, a developer of digital therapeutics, in 2020 at age 64, one year before his mandatory retirement as a professor.[13] After first hearing about digital therapeutics from a physician colleague, he spent about a year studying the field and concluded that his IT expertise could be applied to mental-health problems. HippoT&C subsequently began developing digital therapeutic solutions using VR and AI.[14]

What is striking in Chung’s case is the movement of deep expertise across industry boundaries. He combined the wisdom capital he had built in software with physicians’ clinical knowledge and moved it into a different problem domain: mental health.

3.3. Senior Entrepreneurs in Japan

Entrepreneurship among people in their 50s and older is also increasing in Japan. Startup-loan results for fiscal 2025 from Japan Finance Corporation, a government-owned policy lender, show 4,975 borrowers in their 50s and 1,164 in their 60s. Both age groups were more than 30 percent above fiscal 2022 levels.[15]

Japanese senior entrepreneur Midori Sato (佐藤みどり) moved from being a full-time homemaker to teaching computer classes and later working in a care facility. After personally encountering the difficulty older adults face with grocery shopping while caring for family members, she established Compras Co., Ltd. (コンプラス株式会社) in November 2019 with three like-minded peers of her generation.[16][17]

Compras uses online tools and tablets while retaining telephone and face-to-face options, linking shopping assistance with regular well-being checks. The key in this case was the ability to judge which technologies to use, and how far to use them, so that real users would actually use them.

3.4. Senior Entrepreneurs in India

Indian senior entrepreneur Falguni Nayar built a long career in finance, including 19 years at investment bank Kotak Mahindra, before founding Nykaa in 2012 at age 50.[18] Nykaa began as a digital-first beauty platform and grew into a major consumer platform combining online and offline channels.[19]

What Nayar brought was the ability to read markets and companies, experience in raising capital and judging growth strategies, and an instinct for building organizations and brands. Her wisdom capital appeared as the ability to see markets and organizations structurally.

3.5. Senior Entrepreneurs in Kenya

Kenyan senior social entrepreneur Richard Waindi spent more than 30 years in corporate financial management, audit, risk management, policy, and governance. Yet his venture did not begin in finance. While caring for his aging mother, he saw first-hand how hard it was to find trained caregivers in western Kenya. After his mother died, he founded AgeWatch Africa in 2016.[20][21]

The organization now provides home care, day care, residential care, and caregiver training. The innovation here lay in building a service organization that created a care delivery system where none had previously existed.

4. The Challenges of Senior Entrepreneurship

The Longevity Economy is likely to create more markets and industries. Population aging is reconnecting healthcare and caregiving with housing, finance, mobility, leisure, and technology. Care settings, too, can evolve into living laboratories where users and frontline workers identify problems and help develop products and services. So who will become the entrepreneurs in these industries?

The cases above show that older adults can be among them. But the growth of Longevity Economy markets and the emergence of older adults as entrepreneurs and innovators within those markets are two different things.

OECD data likewise show that people aged 50–64 have relatively high established-business ownership but participate less in early-stage entrepreneurship that creates new firms. One way to read this gap is that experience and resources already accumulated are not moving fully into entrepreneurship and innovation.[12]

4.1. Experience Is an Asset, but It Can Also Create Path Dependence

The successful senior entrepreneurs examined in Section 3 did not simply repeat their previous careers. Chung moved his information-security and software expertise into mental health; Nayar applied a background in finance to a beauty platform; and Sato, despite her computer-education background, did not digitize her entire service.

Experience can help people recognize problems more quickly, but long familiarity with successful ways of working can also create a risk of interpreting new technologies and markets through old frames. Murmann, Salmivaara and Kibler (2023), studying late-career entrepreneurs, found that their innovation outcomes were associated less with age itself than with a combination of innovation orientation, managerial experience, and personal resources.[22]

Senior entrepreneurs therefore need to keep past experience open to new questions. Failure later in life can also carry heavier consequences than it does for younger founders because it may be tied directly to retirement savings. That is why senior entrepreneurship needs structures that allow risk to be shared with research institutions, investors, and younger talent rather than borne by one individual alone.

4.2. Connection Matters More Than Education Alone

A recurring feature of the cases in Section 3 was the combination of different resources. Jim Pollock connected engineering and startup experience with university research technology; Tai-Myoung Chung linked IT expertise with physicians’ clinical knowledge; and Richard Waindi combined family-caregiving experience with expertise in finance, risk management, and governance to build a care organization.

Of course, digital and business-development capabilities still need to be developed and updated. But the OECD also identifies outdated professional networks, difficulty accessing finance, limited information about support programs, and age discrimination as barriers to senior entrepreneurship.[12] Education alone is not the issue. The more important question is whether knowledge and expertise built up over many years can be reconnected with technology, research results, younger talent, investors, and customers.

A 2026 systematic review of senior entrepreneurship and opportunity recognition likewise concludes that the experience, knowledge, networks, and innovation capabilities of 50+ entrepreneurs interact in the process of recognizing business opportunities.[23]

4.3. Senior Entrepreneurship Should Expand from Employment Policy into Innovation Policy

Employment policies that help people supplement income and continue working after retirement are necessary. But from the perspective of the Longevity Economy, they are not enough. The entrepreneurs examined above did more than create jobs for themselves: they commercialized medical technology, moved expertise into new industries, and built service-supply systems that had not previously existed.

OECD research on senior entrepreneurship has already pointed to the potential for using older adults’ human capital in innovative startups.[7] Senior entrepreneurship is therefore a matter of innovation and industrial policy as well as employment policy.

The question changes from “What entrepreneurial opportunities can we offer retired people?” to “How can decades of accumulated expertise and experience move into new industries and innovation?”

Once the question changes, policy tools extend beyond entrepreneurship education. They include technology entrepreneurship for highly experienced professionals, partnerships with university research, intergenerational founding teams, innovation through acquisition and business succession, and accelerator and investment links for late-career entrepreneurs.

OECD comparisons show large cross-country differences in both early-stage entrepreneurship and established-business ownership among people aged 50–64, shaped by labor-market conditions, demographics, retirement systems, access to finance, market opportunities, and social attitudes toward older adults’ economic activity.[12] Senior entrepreneurship requires different forms of connection depending on each region’s industrial structure, market maturity, finance and technology ecosystem, and social institutions.

Conclusion: The Other Half of the Longevity Economy Is Older Adults’ Experience

The OECD’s discussion of “missing entrepreneurs” emphasizes that the quality of entrepreneurship matters alongside the number of entrepreneurs, including job creation, market effects, and quality of work.[24]

The challenge is to turn the knowledge and expertise older adults have built up into entrepreneurial activity that creates products and services, companies, and markets.

If the Longevity Economy expands only older adults’ consumption, the market can still grow. But if it fails to bring older adults’ experience and expertise into innovation, the economy’s resources will remain unused.

Katherine Wells began as a daughter standing beside her parents as they moved through the care system. She drew on more than 20 years in software to turn what she had lived through into a company.

In a longevity society, the experience accumulated over a long working life is the starting point for the innovative companies that grow the Longevity Economy.

[About the Author]

Kim Sung-ki, Ph.D. in Social Welfare

Director, The Care Biz Lab

Chair, SE Empower Social Cooperative

Email: skkwelfare@gmail.com

References

[1] Serenity Engage (2022). “Serenity Engage CEO Katherine Wells Seeking Connectedness in Senior Care” (July 12, 2022). https://serenityengage.com/2022/07/12/serenity-engage-katherine-wells-canvasrebel/

[2] Wells, K. (2019). “9 Days in Memory Care: What I Learned About The System That Cares For Our Parents” (June 1, 2019). Serenity Engage. https://serenityengage.com/2019/06/01/9-days-in-memory-care/

[3] Serenity Engage (2022). “Top Entrepreneur Finalist: Katherine Wells” (April 25, 2022). https://serenityengage.com/2022/04/25/top-entrepreneur-finalist/

[4] Oxford Economics & AARP (2016). The Longevity Economy. https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/the-longevity-economy/

[5] Vasconcelos, A. F. (2018). “Older workers as a source of wisdom capital: broadening perspectives.” Revista de Gestão, 25(1), 102–118. https://doi.org/10.1108/REGE-11-2017-002

[6] Azoulay, P., Jones, B. F., Kim, J. D. & Miranda, J. (2020). “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship.” American Economic Review: Insights, 2(1), 65–82. https://doi.org/10.1257/aeri.20180582

[7] Kautonen, T. (2013). “Senior Entrepreneurship.” OECD Local Economic and Employment Development (LEED) Papers, No. 2013/19. https://doi.org/10.1787/39915b50-en

[8] Kim, Seong-chun, Oh, Seung-hee & Park, Sang-hyuk (2026). “Middle-Aged Entrepreneurs as Experience-Based Innovators in Local Startup Ecosystems in the Digital Transformation Era: Differences in Entrepreneurial Motivation, Competence, and Performance” (in Korean). Journal of Information Technology Applications & Management, 33(3), 1–14.

[9] Kijek, T. (2012). “Innovation Capital and its Measurement.” Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation, 8(4), 52–68. https://doi.org/10.7341/2012844

[10] Gentle Shepherd Care. “Emma Soy, CEO and Founder” (accessed Oct. 6, 2026). https://gentleshepherdcare.com/ceo-profile/

[11] AARP (2026). “How Entrepreneurs Over 50 Are Turning Age Into an Asset” (Mar. 6, 2026). https://www.aarp.org/work/age-discrimination/entrepreneurs-over-50.html

[12] OECD/European Commission (2023). “Seniors’ self-employment and entrepreneurship activities.” The Missing Entrepreneurs 2023. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-missing-entrepreneurs-2023_230efc78-en/full-report/component-12.html

[13] Dong-A Ilbo (2022). “Are Startups Only for the Young? Taking on Digital Therapeutics Just Before Retirement” (in Korean; June 7, 2022, reposted on the HippoT&C website). https://www.hippotnc.com/news/55

[14] Ministry of SMEs and Startups (2022). “K-Startups Shine at CES 2022!” (in Korean; Jan. 11, 2022, Bizinfo). https://www.bizinfo.go.kr/web/lay1/bbs/S1T157C158/AU/112/view.do?article_seq=61196

[15] Japan Finance Corporation (2026). “FY2025 Startup Loan Results: 29,320 Borrowers, ¥168.1 Billion” (in Japanese; May 13, 2026). https://www.jfc.go.jp/n/release/pdf/topics_260513a.pdf

[16] DBJ Startup Support Center. “Midori Sato / Compras Co., Ltd.” (in Japanese; accessed Oct. 6, 2026). https://ssc.jeri.or.jp/activity/sato_midori/

[17] Compras Co., Ltd. “Company Profile / Corporate Information” (in Japanese; accessed Oct. 6, 2026). https://com-pras.co.jp/company/

[18] Nykaa (2022). Annual Return FY2021–22. https://www.nykaa.com/media/wysiwyg/2021/Investors-Relations/pdfs/annual-report/21-22/Nykaa-Annual-Return-FY-21-22.pdf

[19] Nykaa. “Who Are We” (accessed Oct. 6, 2026). https://www.nykaa.com/who_are_we

[20] AgeWatch Africa. “Our Story” (accessed Oct. 6, 2026). https://agewatchafrica.com/our-story/

[21] AgeWatch Africa. “Our Team” (accessed Oct. 6, 2026). https://agewatchafrica.com/our-team/

[22] Murmann, M., Salmivaara, V. & Kibler, E. (2023). “How does late-career entrepreneurship relate to innovation?” Research Policy, 52(6). https://audencia.hal.science/hal-04078560/

[23] Fañanás-Biescas, A. P., Ključnikov, A., Bargoni, A. & Ferraris, A. (2026). “Senior entrepreneurship and opportunity recognition: a systematic review of the literature.” International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 32(4), 846–883. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-04-2025-0436

[24] OECD/European Commission (2023). “Missing entrepreneurs and the quality of entrepreneurship.” The Missing Entrepreneurs 2023. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-missing-entrepreneurs-2023_230efc78-en/full-report/component-7.html

[Series reference] Kim Sung-ki (2026). “The Evolution of the Longevity Economy: From an Ageing Society to Industrial Clusters.”

[Series reference] Kim Sung-ki (2026). “A New Business for Care Centers: Industrial Living Labs in the Longevity Economy.”