Global ageing is one of the great transformations of our time. With life expectancy growing at five hours a day globally, there are around 15 million over-60s in the UK, and forecasts suggest this will double by 2040.
Major economies like the UK experience costs of ageing regarding the reduced productivity of older workers and rising health and social care costs. Demand for new goods and services to increase older workers’ productivity and mitigate health and social care costs is set to rise but business is not catering fully for the over-60s market, even though the economic prize associated with ageing innovation is large. The Silver Economy (the over-50s) is estimated to be worth US$7 trillion globally, and the UK’s older population is responsible for around 40% (£200bn a year) of consumer demand.
The National Innovation Centre for Ageing (NICA) will address the failure of the market to generate information and coordination required to understand the opportunities and then respond to them. It will do this in Newcastle, as the city already has a concentration of research and business expertise in ageing-related innovation.
NICA has five overarching objectives:
Foster academic, business, public sector and third-sector collaboration to maximise translation and commercialisation of ageing opportunities by identifying the commercial potential of ideas/propositions economically, effectively, and efficiently.
Drive public engagement in the design/introduction of goods/services related to ageing.
Catalyse engagement of academia, business, public sector, third sector and the public on ageing issues, to raise awareness of, and capability to address, ageing issues.
Lead development of internationally recognised ageing cluster focused on Newcastle Science Central, driving commercialisation, innovation and growth.
Becoming a viable, self-sustaining organisation by 2025.
Steer Economic Development worked with colleagues at NICA to develop the ‘logic model’ for NICA and its Benefits Realisation Plan (BRP). The logic model set out the context, rationale, inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes and impacts to be achieved; and the BRP outlined how NICA would achieve its objectives, once public funding for the Centre is released.
The Centre is due to open in 2019 and to be self-financing by 2025.
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