Obsolescence versus Innovation

The dinosaur survived for a couple of million years, longer than Homo sapiens to date. So it’s a bit rich to refer to outdated institutions as “dinosaurs” as they’re unlikely to last much longer.

That’s what we’ve been talking about over the past months, messages we’ve been reinforcing during Dr Bill Thomas & Evermore’s Age of Disruption UK tour in June.

Revolution in long-term care is now building. It has momentum. The entrepreneurs and disrupters of innovation are driving forward, driven by the aspirations and desires of older people. Older people who want to continue to grow and develop, not quietly fade away, and are appalled by the choices available to them if and when they need support. They will not move into a care home.

So where does that leave the current residential care market? We suggest it’s obsolete.

Let’s not make the dinosaur comparison; instead let’s look at other Blue-chip organisations that failed to heed the market or their consumers.

The technology world is littered with failures large and small. Who remembers IBM? They were the gold standard for computing worldwide but no longer manufacturer hardware, bounced out of the market in the 90s by that young pretender Dell, led by a ‘genius in his garage’. I distinctly remember the ad campaign: “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM….but nobody got promoted for it either. Dell.”

The technology industry is full of mega successful companies like Microsoft, Apple and Intel, all started by entrepreneurs that refused to accept the status quo. They moved fast, constantly improving and designing new products based on gut instincts rather than focus groups. Who knew we needed an iPod, a smartphone or tablet? Let’s put it this way, I wasn’t the only traveller typing away on an iPad or chatting on their iPhone at Newark airport.

So as a business developer passionate about market-making innovation, I’ve been astonished at the lack of change or even desire for real improvement in the older age sector. Nobody seems to have the energy for transformation, despite the calls from existing and future consumers for radically different services. In fact, at a recent conference with Innovate UK, it was highlighted that the institutional and patriarchal approach to nursing and care hasn’t changed in over 100-years. Can you imagine the size of mobile devices we’d be using today if the tech industry had taken the same view? As Henry Ford once said: “if you’d asked consumers what they wanted they’d have asked for a faster horse.”

At Evermore, we’re engaging on a global level with the thinkers, entrepreneurs and fire starters that get the institutional approach is obsolete. We’re a group of fearless, courageous change makers who are not content with tweaking around the edges and nudging forward. It’s time to embrace this amazing opportunity, creating new products and services that our future consumers don’t even know they want yet. And what we do know is they don’t want what’s available today!

Let’s get started!