analfrehnthoughtpaper

#4Innovating

Old

Age

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Finding

the

New

the

Old

Our age (

sic

) is one which celebrates innovation and novelty in all forms, inall things, in every context. It is exceedingly rare to hear anything but praisefor novelty, and youth in both companies, business models and talents iscontinuously glorified (Think only of all those lists praising those "under40"...). This buzz, this incessant talk of novelty and youth is understandable,as the pursuit of youth and the next new thing has been a part of our culturefor a very long time. We've been swept away by fashion and freshness forages, and will in all likelihood mostly continue on this same path. Still, thisattentention to novelty hides things as well, relegating things to the backrooms of thought. One of these is that which is normally seen as theantithesis of innovation, namely aging and the related phenomenon of oldage.Old age is something of a cipher in business thinking. That old age, andthereby the aged, exists is of course something that everyone knows. Still,reading what is written about business and the economy, you come away withthe feeling that the elderly simply do not exist in the framework most business thinkers operate with. Is it as if business and economy was solely thedomain of the middle-aged, with a small enclave reserved for the young andadventurous, with the elderly relegated to trivial, mundane consumption. Notonly is this ethically questionable as a (hopefully unconscious) limitation, it ispositively dangerous if we are to develop our economies to be all that they can be.The elderly exist. This much I know to be true. They will always exist, and infact, they are set to become a much more important part of the economy thanthey have ever been – and in their own way they have always been an

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exceptionally important, if at times invisible, part thereof. Whereas their roleearlier might have been one of acting in the background, simpledemographics (with a dash of anthropology) tells us that this group might infact be one of the most important groups to understand when developingcontemporary business thinking. The basics of this transformation are simpleenough to comprehend: Improvements in healthcare, nutrition and thegeneral standard of living are working in concert to ensure that the elderly are becoming an ever-bigger part of the general economy. We are, as a plant,graying at rates never seen before. Some see this as a problem, an refer tothings such as healthcare-costs and pension-costs to position the olderpopulation as an issue to be resolved. I feel this is a fallacious way of comprehending change. Yes, we are getting older. But this does not mean that we’re getting worse. In fact, the aging of the world should be seen as anopportunity, a chance to rethink our ideas about age. It is also an immenseopportunity for business, a real chance to enact radical innovation and openup for hundreds or thousands of high-growth, high-innovation new ventures.For this reason, I’ve found it important to look to some of the ways in which I believe that innovation and old age are and can be connected. This isobviously a tentative and early listing, one I hope will mature and developover time (

sic

again), but I hope that it will go some way towards opening upthe issue of innovation and old age.

Agenovation

Let us start with the most important thing: We have to innovate the ways in which we talk about old age. Let me illustrate this with a story from my ownlife. In this, there are two women who both, in their own ways, fit into the