In 2018, when Inc. Magazine named Boston one of the best places to start a business in the country, they highlighted one key reason: Boston is a hub of innovation for products and services that serve an aging population. The “longevity economy” represents a huge economic opportunity. According to AARP and Economist Impact, as of 2020, the over-50 market contributed $45 trillion to global GDP, or 34% of the total.
So what makes Boston an ideal place to do business in the aging industry? According toInc. One key factor is MIT. Specifically, MIT’s AgeLab, a research institute that aims to provide a higher quality of life for the world’s aging population.
This comment prompted AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin, AgeLab researcher and science writer Luke Yokint, and The Boston Globe to develop a year-long series of articles exploring what makes Boston such fertile ground for longevity economy business, and what it might take to make the city even more fertile. Titled “Longevity Hub,” the series has one overarching goal: to explain what it might take to transform Boston into the “Silicon Valley of Aging.”
The Globe series of articles is a reference point on important issues related to the wants, needs, and economic feasibility of older adults, not just in Boston but in the aging community at large. The key is to create a business and research environment that fosters innovation for aging users and customers, and to create opportunities to serve a much larger national and global aging market than just Boston or New England.
But this project with the Globe raised a new question for the MIT AgeLab: What communities outside of Boston have been ahead of the curve in supporting innovations for aging? While Boston may well be the world’s only center of longevity, there are certainly many international communities that can be identified with similar criteria. But where are they? And what makes them successful?
MIT Press has published “Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging,” an edited volume that brings together the Boston Globe series and a new collection of essays . The work includes essays by AgeLab researchers Coughlin, Yoquinto, and Lisa D’Ambrosio, as well as members of the MIT community, including Li-Huei Tsai, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Authors include Raffi Segal, associate professor of architecture and urban planning, and Marisa Moran Jahn, senior scholar at MIT Future Urban Collectives, as well as Elise Selinger, director of MIT’s Housing and Innovation department.
In addition to the Boston Globe articles , the book also includes a collection of new essays by an international group of contributors. These new essays highlight places around the world that have built reputations for innovation in the longevity economy.
The innovation activity described throughout the book may be indicative of a phenomenon called clustering, whereby companies in a particular field emerge or congregate in geographically close locations. Indeed, industrial and innovation agglomerations are undesirable because the physical proximity of companies increases rents and congestion, encouraging dispersion. And for clustering to occur, additional mechanisms must be applied that outweigh these natural costs. One explanation, hypothesized by many researchers, is that clusters tend to arise in places where useful tacit knowledge flows between organizations.
In the case of longevity centers, the editors posit two kinds of tacit knowledge are shared. First, a simple recognition that serving the elderly market is worthwhile. Second, a deep understanding of how to best meet the needs of this market, a challenge that is harder than many who want to dominate the senior market realize. In Coughlin’s previous book, The Longevity Economy (PublicAffairs, 2017), he discusses a long history of failed corporate efforts to design products and services for older adults. While the longevity economy is not an easy thing to talk about, these international longevity centers represent a successful and ongoing effort to address the needs of older consumers.
The book’s opening chapter is about Greater Boston’s longevity epicenter, covering a variety of sectors including biotechnology, health care, housing, transportation and financial services. “Life insurance may be the most obvious example of a financial services industry that provides benefits aligned with consumers’ longevity, but it’s not the only example,” Brooks Tingle, president and CEO of John Hancock, wrote in the post. “Financial institutions, especially those in the business world that are increasingly interested in Boston’s longevity community, should think boldly and join the effort to build a better retirement.”
Other contributions in the book are not limited to Boston. For example, Humana contributor and CEO Bruce Broussard highlights the city of Louisville, Kentucky, as “the nation’s largest hotspot for companies specializing in elderly care,” writing in a chapter describing the city’s mix of large health care companies and small, agile startups. In Newcastle, England, a booming biomedical industry has laid the foundation for a wave of innovation around the idea of viewing aging as an economic opportunity, and early funding from the public sector and academic research has led to business development in the city. Meanwhile, in São Paulo, Brazil, in the absence of public funding from the state, a grassroots network of academics, companies, and other organizations called Envelhecimento 2.0 has been the main driver of aging innovation in the country.
“We’re witnessing a Cambrian explosion of efforts to provide a quality of life for the world’s rapidly growing ageing population,” Coughlin said, “and this boom includes not only start-ups and companies, but also a variety of local economic approaches that are trying to take the longevity benefits of living longer and turn them into opportunities for people to live longer, better lives.”
By 2034, for the first time in history, the number of older people will outnumber children in the United States. This demographic change represents a major social challenge and a huge economic opportunity. The Greater Boston area is considered one of the world’s leading centers of longevity, but as Coughlin and Yokint’s book shows, potential competitors – and collaborators – are emerging everywhere. It remains to be seen where the first innovation clusters worthy of the title “Silicon Valley of Longevity” will emerge, if any.
