On my panel today at SXSW, Cities Harnessing the Longevity Dividend, I’m going to appeal to cities to work with startups to address the challenges of their older populations, and intergenerational societies more broadly.
This isn’t a big leap – over 600 cities and communities are already developing novel strategies for aging, as part of the WHO’s ‘age-friendly’ movement. What we’re not yet seeing, and I’d like to help close the gap here, is those age-friendly activities embracing the latest thinking, technologies and design.
With hundreds of cities in the age-friendly movement, there are thousands of organizations, priorities and actions plans, and millions of citizens impacted by the programs. That’s a treasure trove. But if you ask around at just about any startup accelerator here in Austin or globally (with a few exceptions), the hackers and coders are not working on these problems.
Startups are really great at addressing the big, hairy challenges that large, ossified, complacent organizations can’t, or don’t want to, address.
With that in mind, here are four steps that i’d like to see the WHO take to bridge to next-generation technologies:
- Building and sharing an open repository of data and insights about the needs of intergenerational communities around the world. Essentially, the next rev of Age Friendly World.
- An accessible ‘map’ of the key players and organizations and ability for them to connect with each other around shared opportunities of interest.
- A new focus on clarity and standards to bring sense to the confusing fudge of words and definitions (e.g. there are as many competing definitions of the word ‘community’ as the Finns have for snow…).
- A new ability to involve and play nicely with the private sector, in particular startups.
Each of these need fleshing out, but first each will need to resonate with the WHO. Some, such as working with the private sector, have little prospect of coming to fruition, so other groups, likely the cities themselves, will need to step up.
We’re working on parts of this with our new ‘collective’ program, and now is the opportunity for serious partnership and investment in time and resources from those charged with reshaping our world for future generations.
