Friday, December 23, 2016

Disruptive change will be driven by 'the old' not Millennials - so says the EIU survey of business leaders.

The EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit)  surveyed 1,000 business leaders to find out how their organisations deal with disruption.

A lot of the results are online. 

One of the key findings of the research is that older consumers harbour more disruptive potential than Millennials or even technology itself

Not surprisingly, this is most obvious in the healthcare industry where 86% of the executives believe that the older generation is a greater source of disruptive change than emergent technologies such as data analytics or the Internet of Things. Not that I suppose it will make them feel much better but I can assure them they are right.

The reasons that the report proposes, why oldies are seen as creating disruption are, to put it mildly, simplistic. You know, lots of talk about robotics as home care assistants, telemedicine, wearable technology etc etc.

Of course there is some potential in these technologies, but that is not were the drive for change will come from.

GSK, seems as if it understand one of the strands of change, when it talks about the "consumerisation of healthcare". The bottom line is that for many, maybe most older people, the provision of primary healthcare is somewhere between dreadful and a disaster. And it is only going to get worse. This creates a massive opportunity for companies to provide products and services to fill the gap.

I will return to this subject in early 2017. Dick Stroud

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