It was great to see 80+ registrations and 70+ attendees for our inaugural Smart Aging Asia meet up last night. Together with our partner IMAPAC, JFDI is launching Asia’s first collaborative innovation network for Smart Aging. It will provide a platform where operators, developers and investors of the senior living industry can co-venture to shape novel smart tech solutions for the silver industry, together getting faster and with less risk to make an impact, writes Hugh Mason.
Thank you to friends from Aurum Land, Bayer, Borderless Healthcare Group, BP Singapore, CIO Academy Asia, Cisco, EDB, ETPL, Lien Foundation, Lotus Eldercare, MetLife Lumenlab, Munich Re, Napier Healthcare, NUS, NetApp, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, OCBC Bank, Philips, Singapore Brain Spine Clinic, SMU, Singtel Innov8 and many more organizations for joining us.
First up, Amine Kamel from BOSCH shared details of the collaborative innovation framework it has developed jointly with JFDI to bring non-competing multinationals, SMEs and entrepreneurs into a fair, fast and agile co-venturing structure. Some of his key insights: BOSCH experience is that agile collaborative venturing can reduce innovation costs by a factor of 8 and time to market by a factor of 4. These are two reasons that the JFDI-BOSCH collaborative innovation framework has recently been nominated for an SICC award.
Next, Kim Walker, founder of Silver Group and co-author of Marketing to the Ageing Consumer shared an overview of what Aging means for businesses everywhere. Some of his key insights: Aging consumers respresent the largest, fastest growing, wealthiest, least contested market in the world. Actually it’s three markets that should matter to every business because physical ageing affects everyone and everything. Lastly – they’re not ‘older people’. They are people. Rethink the entire journey through the prism of ageing.
Finally we wrapped up with a discussion exploring if and how attendees might like to take this meetup further. Some points raised:
- As 50% of today’s youngsters will live to be 100 (see The 100 Year Life), we need new, positive language to describe the life stages as we age. The notion of a ‘teenager’ didn’t exist until the 1950s and we need to invent something new to describe the period when we all stay young, longer.
- There are already many networking events, conferences etc on this theme and the fact that this group intends to go beyond talking into doing, and has an inclusive collaborative innovation framework to do it, sets it apart. Online tools like healthcode.io could help us to stay in touch.
- Neither JFDI nor IMAPAC wants to ‘own’ or dominate this community. It will only work if it’s inclusive and everyone relevant feels they belong and has a say in shaping it. I will be reaching out to everyone who expressed interest to explore how, specifically, they want to take the discussion forward over the next few days.