PRIME Initiative

Here’s a short fascinating research study by the Kauffman Foundation, which funds many education and entrepreneurship programmes in the United States. It’s fascinating not least because US trends often end up happening here eventually.

According to the Foundation’s research it’s people in the 55 – 64 age group who are now responsible for the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity in the US. More surprisingly, the research also found that there were twice as many founders of technology companies over the age of 50 as under the age of 25. So even in hi-tech startups its the oldsters who are making the pace.

It is as if, the report mischievously points out, “Entrepreneurship is the New Mid-Life Crisis”.

So who is supporting and training these older entrepreneurs in the US? They are missing a direct equivalent of PRIME, which has always argued that we need to invest more here in providing free support, help and advice for potential entrepreneurs and especially for olderpreneurs.

But they do have a famously entrepreneurial culture and a more forgiving attitude to business failure, which may encourage more people to take a risk. The US also has one of the world’s longest-established and largest business mentoring programmes in the form of SCORE (originally the Service Corps of Retired Executives), and a government-funded business support service (the Small Business Administration) that goes right back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Like Ike and the US Congress at the time we believe that an investment in encouraging small businesses is quickly recouped as new businesses are established. It seems to us that the value added and return on investment in supporting enterprise is far greater than the returns on investing in employability.

And yet here in the UK we spend much more on employability schemes than on enterprise support, and vastly more on employability schemes for the over 50s into than on supporting older entrepreneurship.

But attitudes may at last be changing in the UK. SFEDI (the Small Firms Enterprise Development Initiative) has long been an advocate of free universal enterprise support, but now it is being joined by an association of small business trade associations working together under the Genesis Initiative.

If we invested more in free universal enterprise support, we might not immediately overtake the United States when it comes to having a thriving small-business culture. But we’d certainly speed up the economic recovery.