Changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovative opportunity.
Of all external changes, demographics—defined as changes in population, its size, age structure, composition, employment, educational status, and income—are the clearest. They are unambiguous. They have the most predictable consequences. They have a major impact on what will be bought, by whom, and in what quantities.
Demographics shifts may be inherently unpredictable, yet they do have long lead times before impact, and lead times, moreover, that are predictable. Particularly important are age distribution and with the highest predictive value changes in the center of population gravity, that is, in the age group that at any given time constitutes both the largest and the fastest-growing age cohort in the population. In the U.S. in the 1960s, this was a shift to teenagers as the fastest-growing group. With these shifts came a change in what would be considered “representative” behavior. The teenagers of course continued to behave like teenagers. But that was widely dismissed as the way teenagers behave rather than seen as a change in the constitutive values of behavior of society. Statistics are only the starting point. For those genuinely willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovative opportunity.
ACTION POINT: What are the demographic factors that affect the market for your products or services? Project these factors five to ten years into the future. What opportunities do they create?
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker