The Kids are Alright--But Older Folk Are Just as
Innovative
There's
a misconception that breakthrough products or services are always created by
smart young brains. But the evidence shows that innovation is ageless.
Executive director, Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation
and Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology
Every
generation has its own slang and everyone over the age of 40 give or take a few
years professes not to understand what "the kids" are saying, singing
or emoji-ing. This isn't exactly new inter-generational news. But it is
part of a pervasive belief that is foisted upon us regularly and religiously by
the mass media and, even more so, by lazy marketers. They are quick to
use age cohorts as speedy and simplistic guides to extract all sorts of meaning
and to help them explain (or perhaps, more honestly, attempt to justify)
behaviors which, in truth, are far more complicated and more broadly
distributed than they would prefer to admit or perhaps actually even
understand. They seize on age as a shorthand, much like a drunk grabs a
lamppost - not so much for illumination as for support.
They
tell us that we act consistently and predictably in well-defined clusters and
age-inflected groups; that our beliefs, desires and ultimately our own actions
are inexorably dictated by chronological metrics; and thus demographics
enforced by custom, tradition and peer pressures are the primary be-all and the
end-all keys to discovering and manipulating our behaviors. The bulk of this
conversation and most of the application of this idea has been toward product
and service consumption. Yet every four years as we enter a new election cycle,
we read, see and hear a great deal about how the same approach dictates the
speeches, strategies, and spending of our politicians as well as they parade
before and pander to defined segments of the populace.
A
parallel and probably more unfortunate belief-- and one that's especially
troublesome to old guys like me-- is that problem-solving abilities, the
creation of novel solutions, and pure inventive powers belong to the young.
This capability is known as fluid intelligence. Conversely, we're told
that our vision, flexibility and perceptions - basically our ability to see
outside and beyond the boxes that we each build around ourselves - hardens
along with our arteries and becomes far less agile and flexible as we age. The
theory is that in order to keep moving forward as we grow older, we come to
rely on a different and distinct set of skills based on our accumulated
experience and iterative abilities. We thus focus more on incremental
innovations and improvements rather than inspirational and game-changing
moonshots. Not, just to be clear, that there's really anything wrong with that approach.
This
more mature and deliberative capability is sometimes described as crystallized
intelligence and relies on accumulated knowledge, pattern recognition and
strategies of successive approximation rather than waiting for things to be
perfect. Of course, these are the talents and the basic tools of every
seasoned entrepreneur.
But the
pundits and "professionals" would argue that break-through
discoveries and major strides forward in tech, innovation and new business
development in general are age-bound and belong primarily to the young. We hear
this theory expressed as indisputable gospel virtually every day in the tech
world and, of course, in Hollywood as well where aging is definitely a mortal
sin.
But the
empirical data don't really support this simplistic and misleading conclusion.
Across the board, as consumers, as business starters, and as innovators,
there's just no question that we are seeing that age is nothing more than a
state of mind, and that the idea that relative age alone is predictive of the
expected outcomes makes no sense. Every day we see new entrepreneurs, change
agents, and disruptive innovators of all ages enter the fray. In fact,
the latest research suggests that the most successful business builders launch
their ventures in their mid-30s or even later and not while they're still wet
behind the ears.
Consumer
examples inconsistent with the pat assumptions about age are everywhere. We
hear that streaming is a new and youth-oriented behavior, but the most rapid
and substantial growth in this type of media consumption is among viewers aged
50 to 59. When you see Jeffrey Katzenberg (68) and Meg Whitman (63) talk
excitedly about Quibi, their new startup, which reimagines TV,
you start to understand that all the old rules and stale perceptions have been
tossed out with the trash.
Cameo,
one of the hottest and fastest-growing startups in Chicago, just raised $50
million to expand its business of providing personalized selfie shout-outs from
tens of thousands of minor celebs, jocks, and YouTube influencers to consumers
worldwide. You'd think the core audience for the almost 400,000 of these short,
raw and gimmicky videos that have been created to date would be social media
obsessed kids (using their folks' credit cards or Apple pay) and you'd be dead
wrong. The core audience for Cameo is women 24 to 35 years old, 85% of the
requests are gifts for others, and more than a third of the requests already
come from abroad.
And, of
course, while the Millies (18-to-34) are certainly spending lots of time
online, it's still the Gen X grown-ups (35-to-54) and Boomers (55-to-74) with the deeper
pockets who are by far the largest two e-commerce purchasing
populations as of now.
And
frankly, while age no longer means very much in terms of what we as individuals
buy, sell and consume, it means even less when you start talking about
important and impactful innovations. The premise that the only real and
dramatic changes - in medicine for example - come as a result of some Eureka!
moment in a lab manned by researchers in their 30s along with their graduate
student assistants doesn't comport with the facts on the ground.
One of
the most compelling examples often cited by Dr. Darshak Sanghavi, the chief
medical officer at OptumLabs, relates to the improvement between 1970 and 1995
in the long-term survival rates of children with leukemia, which improved
from under 20 percent to almost 80 percent during that time. This increase was
impressive not only because it saved thousands of kids' lives--the ultimate
goal-- and equally because of the very basic methodology that brought about
such substantial improvements in outcomes.
There
hadn't been any new chemotherapy drug or any material advance in the efficacy
of the existing primary drugs during this period and yet there was a huge
reduction in pediatric mortality basically because, through repeated programs
of iterative trial and error, the doctors improved the use, consistent
application, protocols and effectiveness of the existing drugs. They eventually
learned what worked best.
There
was no new invention at work here - simply, innovation achieved through
successive approximation and repeated attempts to keep getting a little bit
better all the time. And just to be clear, these weren't newbie doctors;
they were clinicians of every age and stripe who came together to share
information, exchange their practical experiences, and document the outcomes of
hundreds of trials.
If
anything, this was a clear example, not of youthful and inspired invention, but
of hard-core applications of the very traditional scientific methods which had
been around just short of forever, and which are at the very heart of
successful innovation.