Enterprise Insight, the government-backed organisation that encourages young people to become more entrepreneurial, has decided to remove its upper age limit in response to a surge of interest in starting up a business from people of all ages.

The initiative follows the discovery that a growing number of people above the targeted age range of 14 to 30 were coming to ask for help. The expansion will particularly focus on women, ethnic minorities and the over-fifties.

Enterprise Insight runs the year-round Make Your Mark campaign to encourage enterprise among 14 to 30-year-olds. Its main event is National Enterprise Week, which takes place in November.

The move to widen the age range is the brainchild of Enterprise Insight’s new chief executive, Harry Rich, who previously spent eight years at the Design Council advising small businesses on how to become competitive. His decision to abandon the age barrier mirrors recommendations made in the government’s recent enterprise strategy paper.

Rich said: “There is no reason to think that it should just be 14 to 30-year-olds who express an interest in enterprise. The age barrier has become completely artificial. We realised that it was impossible to say to a 31-year-old woman we are not going to talk to you whereas we will talk to a 29-year-old woman.”

He added: “What we are really about is releasing untapped enterprise potential across the country, wherever that enterprise potential sits, and giving people the interest and excitement and the mechanisms to follow it through. Young people remain a core part of our work, but there are other areas of enterprise potential.”

He has embarked on a three-month investigation into how best to communicate with new segments of the population. Enterprise Insight was set up five years ago with the support of the Confederation of British Industry, the Institute of Directors, the British Chambers of Commerce and the Federation of Small Businesses, and at present has a fairly straightforward route to young people through schools and colleges. But Rich is aware that communicating with the new groups he has identified could be much more challenging.

“People at schools and colleges are much easier to get to. It is much more challenging to reach the stay-at-home mums,” he said.

As well as the Make Your Mark campaign, which last year included a one-day challenge in which 38,000 young people took part, hundreds of Make Your Mark clubs have been set up in schools and colleges across the country to encourage and foster entrepreneurial activity.

Rich hopes that many of the activities Enterprise Insight runs can be adapted to appeal to an older age range and so encourage new pockets of enterprise to emerge.

He said: “There are all sorts of barriers to women’s enterprise. One of the barriers, all the evidence shows, is that women don’t have the confidence to engage in enterprise activity. That might be because they have moved out of the world of work for a while when they have been having children; it might simply be because of other social factors.”

Enterprise Insight has already taken one step to counteract this by appointing a range of women ambassadors. Successful women entrepreneurs have agreed to act as role models for other women lacking the courage to take the plunge.

Explore Entrepreneur

• SME

• Start-ups