Aging: a call to innovate

How technology needs to adapt to aging societies

Joseph Coughlin

People over 50 are the fastest-growing population in the industrialized world. In some nations, those over age 85 are the fastest-growing cohort. More life per person, emphatically, is a good thing. But the question how to realize the dividend of longer life while managing both the economic and social challenges of an aging society remains unanswered.

Ironically, the greatest current beneficiary of longer life are doomsayers – thinkers and organizations who decry a “gray dawn”, “the perfect storm” or a “seismic shift” toward an older society that will bankrupt economies, stifle innovation and devastate healthcare systems.

These dire forecasts are indeed likely if we view future aging as an amplified replay of our grandparents’ old age. However, there is another face of aging. To succeed in a shifting demographic landscape, innovators must understand the features of the new terrain: a generation that will demand a better old age, the revenue sources that will pay for them to experience it and the organizations that will deliver it. In other words: Aging has to be understood as a call to innovate.

In looking at the delivery of innovations required to support the needs and wants of the new demography, four markets emerge: support, enabling, lifestyle and social Impact.

FOUR MARKETS FOR AGING SOCIETIES

Support is the traditional aging market, emphasizing formal caregiving and services such as nutrition services, healthcare and care for the chronically ill and disabled. The support market relies financially on the nonprofit or voluntary sector, some private funding such as families, but most important, long-standing public agencies to ensure that the most frail receive care.

Significant research is underway to build solutions for the support market, partly due to growing levels of need. However, many innovators also focus on this quadrant because it fits the traditional image of aging: that growing old is tantamount to disability and diminished health.

Enabling refers to the physical “infrastructure” of an aging society, including community design, transportation services and housing. These services and facilities investments, which are government-funded or subject to public-planning processes, are essential to independent and healthy living for older people. In addition, the automobile industry has invested in ensuring personal “automobility” scaled to older buyers, which typically purchase their most profitable cars.

A new opportunity that will enable older adult independence and financial security is education throughout the life span. Continuing education programs will allow workers to remain sharp in the skills and technology of their professions. Similarly, education will facilitate career changes for those who seek new fields at age 50 or even 60 after decades in the profession.

Lifestyle products and services represent a rapidly emerging market. This market includes pursuing fun, travel and wellness, and proactively managing the impacts of age. Consequently, it is funded almost entirely by personal discretionary income. Wellness may be one of the fastest-growing markets worldwide. It touches nearly every industry and is fueled by the aging of the boomers, now entering chronic disease prime time and experiencing the aches and pains of older age.

Older adults in nearly all industrialized countries form a new disruptive force

Housing modifications also are also intimately connected to lifestyle. Most older adults indicate that they would like to age in place. In addition to renovating their homes, the next generation of older adults will seek products and services to help them stay there, hiring people to take care of simple home maintenance and remote monitoring.

The lifestyle market will be the most dynamic of the four quadrants and introduce some of the most creative products and services. In many ways, the older adult market will become the lifestyle leader for a new way of living across the life span.

The emerging social impact market represents the investment of private time, money and passion by people who want to “make a difference.” The nonprofit and activist community may find in this market its greatest growth opportunity since the baby boomers were in their teens and twenties. As the social impact market grows, business and government will find that its wields outsize influence on their operations and policy decisions. The lasting social impact of the next generation of older people may be due simply to their renewed activism – that is, “old” becomes synonymous with re-engagement not retirement as civic engagement in older age becomes the new standard.

The implications and opportunities of demographic aging are profound. Longevity is to be celebrated as older adults in nearly all industrialized countries form a new “disruptive” force that demands rethinking what is needed to meet an aging population’s expectations.

This article is an abridged version of Joseph Coughlin’s contribution published in The Upside of Aging

Aging: a call to innovate

How technology needs to adapt to aging societies

Joseph Coughlin

Aging: a call to innovate

How technology needs to adapt to aging societies

Joseph Coughlin

Aging at the multiplex

Diversifying diets and portfolios

Economic growth in the very long run

How aging populations can save us