A few years ago the noted management thinker Warren Bennis wrote about a number of great teams from our recent history, and chronicled what it was that made them so great.  A noticeable trait of all of the teams was that they were generally very young, and often in their 20s.

It’s a narrative that carries a degree of weight in terms of innovation.  Not only do younger brains have a greater capacity to learn, they are also unburdened by the weight of what has gone before.  When you literally don’t know ‘the way things are supposed to be’, you’re freed up to create novel alternatives to the status quo.

What are the implications of this for a western society that is ageing?  A recent study set out to find out just that.  It looked at 33 OECD countries over a 42 year period from 1960 to try and uncover any links between the age of a population and its innovative output.

The study used the dependency ratio to determine the age of the population, and the number of patents per 1,000 residents as the gauge of its inventiveness.

Timeless innovation

The results were fascinating, with the peak inventiveness of a society appearing to be when the dependency ratio was around 25 older people per 100 members of society.  It’s a ratio that Japan met as far ago as 1999, and Germany in 2001.  It suggests that countries such as these will see their innovative capabilities decline in the coming years.

Immigration remains a hot potato in much of the western world, so on the assumption that birth rates are likely to remain much the same, and migration levels seem likely to fall, what else can governments do to try and encourage inventiveness in ageing societies?

The authors suggest that much of our innovation derives from necessity.  As societies age, its population understands that to maintain high standards of living, they must innovate to raise productivity levels.

The problem with this is that older people tend to be less favorable towards innovation, and change more generally, than the young.  Interestingly though, this phenomenon weakens when it is the entire population that’s ageing.

The authors advocate that the best approach is for policy makers to simultaneously do all they can to support innovation, whilst also raising awareness about the adverse effects of an ageing population in terms of healthcare, pensions and the economic wellbeing of society.

As with so much, the first step is awareness, both among policy makers but also the wider public.  Only from there can the challenge be tackled head on.