I’m attending the fourth Business Innovation Factory Summit in Providence. This conference is organized like TED, with presenters telling their stories in 15-minute time slots. Many are about innovation and/or collaboration, while a few are simply inspirational.
The first day featured a couple of very interesting stories about innovation in healthcare, specifically, how the intersection of healthcare and eldercare. Matt Cottam of Tellart, an industrial design firm, described the BIF-sponsored Nursing Home of the Future project. Cottam’s team immersed themselves in a local nursing home/assisted living center to find out what the experience is like from all angles.
There’s a huge strain on our current system today regarding aging, and it’s going to get bigger in the future as the boomers age. According to Cottam, there 35 million people over 65 in the world today and there will be 87 million when boomers age. It costs $80,000 for a year in a nursing home, $240,000 for three years. Cottam’s take is that our eldercare system is in such disarray that it’s really a non-system.
Essentially the immersion project was a classic analysis of the jobs to be done in the eldercare space. In the end Cottam’s team identified about 50 “low-hanging opportunities” for business innovation and design in this space. Some jobs would be satisfied by new devices or changes in product and device design. Others would require new business with innovative business models. “Opportunity is everywhere,” Cottam concluded.
Later on Joseph Coughlin spoke. He’s the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Age Lab, the first multi-disciplinary research program sponsored by government and business to understand the behavior of the 45+ population as decision-makers, consumers, patients, caregivers, advisors and technology users.
Coughlin discussed aging as a personal issue with profound public implications. The decisions to be made go well beyond considerations about money and 401Ks, about which we are all currently obsessing, and quite understandably so. According to Coughlin, even asking a relatively simple question such as “where are you going to live?” opens up a larger set off issues including transportation availability, access to healthcare, and even whether or not you might be able to handle stairs. And this is before you consider your chances of dealing with a chronic disease (those chances are better than average) and your ability to do so.
My takeaway at least from these sessions was a reaffirmation that innovation does not just take place in the business world – we are all faced with the need to gain an in-depth understanding of the jobs we’re trying to get done now and will need to do in the future, the constraints we are under, and then use that knowledge to innovate our own lives.
There’s much, much more going on at BIF-4. Check out the Twitter stream here.
