This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Idealism, it's often thought, runs high at either end of the age spectrum and sags in the middle. The altruistic inclinations of youth are set aside due to the professional and personal demands of midlife but reemerge as one ages into maturity.
The idea that it's never too late to make a difference is reassuring. But newly published research by David Lucas, assistant professor of management at Costello College of Business at George Mason University, complicates that cozy notion—at least as it concerns the rising business trend of social entrepreneurship. Concentrating on contemporary U.S. microbusiness entrepreneurs, Lucas' paper in Journal of Business Venturing Insights finds that the younger generation is indeed quite purpose-driven compared with entrepreneurs in midcareer.
Yet the drive to do good through entrepreneurship doesn't revive among those in late career; instead, it declines further through the generations. "We hear a lot in popular press, and we see a lot in our classrooms, that young people are drawn to entrepreneurship for the potential ways entrepreneurs can enact their values through their business," Lucas says. "More broadly, there's a sense that young people are seeking more purpose in their work, that there's been a kind of generational change along these lines.
But there's not much research on how that plays out in entrepreneurship." Lucas' study used the 2024 Entrepreneurship in the Population (EPOP) Survey, which "asked microbusiness owners—meaning entrepreneurs with fewer than 10 employees—whether their business was 'mission-driven' or not. And then they went further to ask about different causes or domains that this mission might entail," Lucas says. "An important feature in the EPOP survey is that it looks at the identity that entrepreneurs ascribe to their businesses, whereas prior work focuses more on entrepreneurs' intentions as individuals." In all, Lucas analyzed answers from 1,600 microbusiness owners in the United States, 629 of whom identified their business as "mission-driven" (focused on environmental sustainability and/or social impact).
Within that subset, entrepreneurs younger than 30 were heavily overrepresented—nearly half (46%) of them claimed the "mission-driven" label for their business, compared with 37% for the survey as a whole. In contrast to the "U-shaped" theory of altruism along the life course, each age cohort was approximately 19% more likely to declare mission-driven status than their immediate elders. "That top-line finding of younger overrepresentation in mission-driven entrepreneurship was pretty stark," Lucas remarks.
"It's a pattern that should be accounted for when we're talking about entrepreneurship in public policy, when we're teaching in the classroom, when we're thinking about support organizations like incubators and things like that." The intergenerational contrasts didn't end there. Younger and older "mission-driven" entrepreneurs tended to focus on very different domains, both in quantity and in substance. Entrepreneurs in early career were more than twice as likely as those ages 50–64 to pursue an "integrated" mission—with goals straddling social, environmental and community impact.
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