MIXING-UP STARTUPS

I sold my Architectural practice when I was 50 to become a speaker, writer, and artist, and I dabbled in some product ideas. It was not quite what you would call a startup, but I was starting again. It is undoubtedly one of the most rewarding things I have done, but also one of the hardest.

In the 50s, British psychologist Ramond Catell wrote a paper suggesting two distinct age-based thinking styles. In our twenties and thirties, we tend to think in what he termed fluid thinking, the ability to solve new problems and come up with ideas seemingly out of thin air. On the other hand, crystallised thinking, more prominent in our late fifties and beyond, is the ability to solve problems using our learned knowledge and experience.

This theory has been supported by a more recent study of the Nobel Prize in economics led by Bruce Weinberg, where they found winners in two age groups with two different thinking styles. Winners in their early careers tended to use conceptual thinking, coming up with ideas outside the box. On the other hand, older winners tended to use experimental innovation, utilising all their knowledge and experience in their box of life and putting it back together in different ways to come up with new solutions.

In 2018, two MIT Professors, Pierre Azoulay and J. Daniel Kim, along with Javier Miranda of the US Census Bureau, studied 2,7 million…