Ageing and Sustainability

Picture a Venn diagram in which the ageing, entrepreneurship and sustainability agendas overlap. That’s what a consortium of the Volans Innovation Lab, Cranfield University and Accenture began to do late in 2009, mapping and exploring a rich opportunity space for research, policy-making and business action. A concept paper: ’The Second Half‘ has evolved as a background brief for a series of workshops under the same title throughout 2010.

A world of 9 billion people by mid-century will be unsustainable in multiple dimensions without profound technological, economic, social and political transformations. Properly understood, the sustainability agenda is about the fundamental, intergenerational task of winding down the dysfunctional economic and business models of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the evolution of new ones fit for human population headed towards nine billion people, living on a small planet already in ‘ecological overshoot’.

Our chances of success will be massively compromised, however, unless we work out how to tackle the most critical demographic challenge on the developed the world, the ageing trend which some now call the ‘Silver Tsunami’.

The first three set of ‘Second Half’ workshops covered changing Baby Boomer attitudes to work, the segmentation of markets focused on the over-50s, and innovation targeted at the over-50s. The aim is to open out the range of topics over time.

Whatever the topic, however, the Venn diagram mentioned above has been central to our thinking and work in this space. On the ageing front, demographic trends have long been central to the sustainability agenda, but the focus has too often been on the number of people and population growth rates—rather than on the implications of wider demographic trends for the levels of entrepreneurship in a society, for the balance between an appetite for change in a society and status-quo-oriented conservatism, and for the prospects of achieving longer term sustainability.