Living healthily to 120: Implications for entrepreneurship

Research on how to slow, halt, and reverse aging processes is making progress. Pharmaceutical, big-tech, and venture capital companies and their owners are making considerable investments in potential (epi)genetic, molecular, cellular, and organ-based interventions and therapies. This essay considers implications for entrepreneurship in the case that such interventions would eventually result in a doubling of the human healthspan. A vastly extended middle age would imply potential changes in opportunities, the future time perspective of entrepreneurs, the pace of time as experienced by entrepreneurs, and the relationship between age and entrepreneurial success. The essay also outlines a range of wider considerations: The need for new life phases in the now vastly extended middle age; the meaning and function of of the last life phase; changes in health beliefs; implications for sustainability; and implications for inequality. The final section ties the essay together by discussing how entrepreneurship scholarship can help move the longevity domain forward.