Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Does aging population hinder Innovation?

Here is the reasoning basis.
Sociologists have described a technology adoption life cycle, which represents the way an invention spreads throughout a community. It’s depicted as a bell curve where the x-axis represents time and the y-axis represents the number of adopters. [...] If the young tend to be more creative and to adopt new ideas more readily than the old, then the coming demographic changes—rising median ages across the West—portend a strong headwind for innovation in the next decades. Not only will we have fewer workers, but we’ll also have fewer inventors and what new ideas we have will face stronger resistance. [...] (by Michael Gibson, Forbes)

It sounds palusbile, although it is not clear yet how deeply innovation levels are affected by demographics. Additionally, I'd say that the coming demographic changes are not likely to affect all levels of innovation (from smartphones and tablets to tomographs and clean energy) in the same way.

So here lies one question: Can current economic and demographic trends around the globe change the geography of innovation markets (both production and consumption) in the future?

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