EVEN BEFORE THE Great Recession, older entrepreneurs led the way in new business formation. The trend has continued during the past three years and spans even high-tech businesses once thought the sole turf of 20-somethings. What's even more noteworthy is that start-ups with older owners are more successful, at least measured by their survival rates.

"The United States might be on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom--not in spite of an aging population but because of it," the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation stated in a report last year. Kauffman backs major entrepreneurship research, including annual reports on new business formation and an ongoing look at the experiences of 5,000 businesses begun in 2004.

"Contrary to popularly held assumptions, it turns out that over the past decade or so, the highest rate of entrepreneurship activity belongs to the 55-64 age group," the study found. "In every single year from 1996 to 2007, Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 had a higher rate of entrepreneurial activity than those aged 20-34." Further, the report noted, increasing life expectancy suggests a blossoming in even older entrepreneurs. Today's "entrepreneurial 60-year-olds could be 2020's entrepreneurial 70-year-olds."

Survival skills. Kauffman's 2010 update to its study of how start-ups have fared over time found that "firms surviving through 2008 were much more likely than firms that exited over the period to have primary owners older than age 45." Of the 5,000 start-ups included when the study began in 2004, 48 percent were started by persons 45 or older, but 64 percent of the surviving companies were headed by entrepreneurs in that age group. "Previous industry experience and start-up experience had less impact on firm survival prospects than owner age did."

The most successful path for entrepreneurs of any age, notes Dennis Ceru, an adjunct professor at Babson College, is to pursue ventures that build on their experiences and skills. "Usually, we say that entrepreneurs who stay close to their experience base often show greater success in their ventures." But for older entrepreneurs, he emphasizes, the definition of success can be very broad.

"There are what we call 'necessity' entrepreneurs," Ceru says. These are older people who pursue new businesses mostly because they have unmet financial needs. "But there also are a significant number of what we call 'opportunity' entrepreneurs," he explains. "These are people who feel compelled, who feel the desire to make something happen." Money may not be inconsequential to them, but it's not their prime motivator.

Ceru is also not surprised that older persons are active entrepreneurs, since they have greater experience and often more financial resources than younger people. They also may have extensive business connections that help them anticipate and bypass barriers, rather than frontally assaulting them as their more youthful counterparts might. The result in both cases can be success, but the route to achieving it is quite different.

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