Zugabe Prize

Improving society is possible at any age. With the Zugabe Prize, we honour business founders aged 60+ every year. The award, which is endowed with EUR 60,000 to each recipient, honours three personalities who have found solutions to the social challenges of our time by entrepreneurial means and have successfully built up a company or a social enterprise for this purpose.

The Zugabe Prize honours people who show with their businesses that experience and innovation, retirement and new beginnings, age and social impact complement each other productively – and who thus give all generations the courage to use this phase after midlife in a new way: For an encore.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are not the privilege of the younger generation. Older people not only bring with them the experience of new beginnings and in shaping society, but often also have a great resource of time after their working lives. Much can be made of this: an encore – for the individual and for all of us.

We want to encourage people to use the phase after midlife to find creative solutions to the problems and challenges of our time. It draws attention to the people who are already active with good ideas for a better society, and fortifies those who want to use the change into the post-work phase to take responsibility for social change themselves.