In 2018, when Inc. Journal named Boston one of many nation’s prime locations to begin a enterprise, it highlighted one vital motive: Boston is an innovation hub for services and products catering towards the growing older inhabitants. The “longevity economic system” represents an enormous chunk of financial alternative: As of 2020, the over-50 market contributed $45 trillion to world GDP, or 34 % of the overall, according to AARP and Economist Affect.
What makes Boston such an excellent place to do enterprise in growing older? One necessary issue, in line with the Inc. story, was MIT — particularly, MIT’s AgeLab, a analysis group dedicated to creating a top quality of life for the world’s rising growing older inhabitants.
Impressed by that declare, AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin, AgeLab science author and researcher Luke Yoquinto, and The Boston Globe organized a yearlong collection of articles to discover what makes Boston such a fertile floor for companies within the longevity economic system — and what may make its soil even richer. The collection, titled “The Longevity Hub,” had an enormous purpose in thoughts: describing what could be obligatory to rework Boston into the “Silicon Valley of growing older.”
The articles from the Globe collection stand as a primer on key points associated to the desires, wants, and financial capabilities of older folks, not simply in Boston however for any group with an growing older inhabitants. Importantly, making a enterprise and analysis surroundings conducive to innovation on behalf of older customers and clients would create the chance to serve nationwide and world growing older markets far bigger than simply Boston or New England.
However that undertaking with the Globe raised a brand new query for the MIT AgeLab: What communities, Boston apart, have been forward of the curve of their assist of growing older innovation? Extra seemingly than Boston standing because the world’s lone longevity hub, there have been likely many worldwide communities that might be recognized utilizing related phrases. However the place have been they? And what makes them profitable?
Now The MIT Press has printed “Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging,” an edited quantity that collects the unique articles from The Boston Globe collection, in addition to a set of recent essays. Along with AgeLab researchers Coughlin, Yoquinto, and Lisa D’Ambrosio, this work contains essays by members of the MIT group together with Li-Huei Tsai, director of the Picower Institute for Studying and Reminiscence; the writer crew of Rafi Segal (affiliate professor of structure and urbanism) and Marisa Moràn Jahn (senior researcher at MIT Future City Collectives); in addition to Elise Selinger, MIT’s director of residential renewal and renovation.
Along with these Boston Globe articles, the guide additionally features a new assortment of essays from a world set of contributors. These new essays spotlight websites all over the world which have developed a repute for innovation within the longevity economic system.
The progressive exercise described all through the guide might exemplify a phenomenon referred to as clustering: when companies inside a given sector emerge or congregate shut to 1 one other geographically. On its face, industrial or innovation clustering is one thing that ought to not occur, since, when companies get bodily shut to 1 one other, hire and congestion prices improve — incentivizing their dispersal. For clustering to happen, then, extra mechanisms have to be at play, outweighing these pure prices. One doable clarification, many researchers have theorized, is that clusters are likely to happen the place helpful, tacit information flows amongst organizations.
Within the case of longevity hubs, the editors hypothesize that two kinds of tacit information are being shared. First is the straightforward consciousness that the older market is value serving. Second is perception into how finest to satisfy its wants — a trickier proposition than many would-be elder-market conquerors understand. An earlier guide by Coughlin, “The Longevity Economy” (PublicAffairs, 2017), discusses a protracted historical past of failed makes an attempt by corporations to design services and products for older adults. Chatting with the longevity economic system just isn’t straightforward, however these worldwide longevity hubs signify profitable, ongoing efforts to deal with the wants of older shoppers.
The guide’s opening chapters on the Higher Boston longevity hub embody a swathe of sectors together with biotech, well being care, housing, transportation, and monetary providers. “Though life insurance coverage is probably the clearest instance of a monetary providers trade whose pursuits align with shopper longevity, it’s removed from the one one,” writes Brooks Tingle, president and CEO of John Hancock, in his entry. “Monetary corporations — particularly these in Boston’s more and more longevity-aware enterprise group — ought to dare to assume huge and be part of the trouble to construct a greater previous age.”
The guide’s different contributions vary far past Boston. They spotlight, for instance, Louisville, Kentucky, which is “the nation’s largest scorching spot for companies specializing in growing older care,” writes contributor and Humana CEO Bruce Broussard, in a chapter describing the town’s mixture of huge health-care corporations and smaller, nimbler startups. In Newcastle, within the U.Okay., a thriving biomedical trade laid the groundwork for a burst of innovation across the thought of growing older as an financial alternative, with preliminary funding from the general public sector and educational analysis giving method to enterprise growth within the metropolis. In Brazil’s São Paulo, in the meantime, within the absence of public funding from the nationwide authorities, a grassroots community of lecturers, corporations, and different establishments referred to as Envelhecimento 2.0 is the principle driver of growing older innovation within the nation.
“We’re seeing a Cambrian explosion of efforts to offer a top quality of life for the world’s booming growing older inhabitants,” says Coughlin. “And that explosion contains not simply startups and corporations, but additionally totally different regional financial approaches to taking the longevity dividend of residing longer, and remodeling it into a possibility for everybody to reside longer, higher.”
By 2034, for the primary time in historical past, older adults will outnumber youngsters in america. That demographic shift represents an infinite societal problem, and a grand financial alternative. Higher Boston stands as a premier world longevity hub, however, as Coughlin and Yoquinto’s quantity illustrates, there are potential rivals — and collaborators — popping up left and proper. If and when innovation clusters befitting the title of “the Silicon Valley of longevity” do come up, it stays to be seen the place they are going to seem first.
