My name is Jim Johnson, I'm a Kenan distinguished professor of strategy and entrepreneurship in the Kenan-Flagler Business School, and I direct the urban investment strategy center, in the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. I am a geographer slash demographer by training, so I study, big population shifts and, in particular, the role of international migration. At shifts in age structure on society, businesses and local communities. The big problem, in a word, is global aging. Every region of the world, is aging except sub-Saharan Africa. To think about some of the signs of global aging Japan sold more adult diapers last year than they did baby diapers. China has the 4-2-1 problem, because of it's one child policy, every child has two parents and four grandparents to take care of. If you want other examples today in the United States, about 16% of the US population is 65 or older. By 2050 it will be, 2040 it will be 26% of our population will be 40 or be 65 or older. We've reached a critical milestone in the United State. Our last year, for the first time in history. Death succeeded births among our non-Hispanic white population. And so were going to see a dramatic transformation in our population. Over the years a change in the racial and ethnic composition because of an aging white population and accelerated deaths among the population. 40 million people in the US have elder care responsibilities, and we've experienced the loss of about, on an annual basis, of about $30 billion in workplace productivity because of the people who have elder care responsibilities. It is one of the most dramatic shifts that we have experienced. And few, if any organizations are prepared to deal with what we call the silver tsunami. I think the real big issue for us in society is, how do we help the elderly? Age gracefully and in place in their communities and in their homes to move into a, adult care facility you need a net worth of about $1.5 million. The proportion of our population that can afford that is dwindling and going in the wrong direction. Everything has to change as a function of an aging population. Everything in our person centered environment. And everything in the built environment has to change. As a function of an aging population. The real opportunities here are making sure that we develop entrepreneurial ideas and businesses. To, to transform both personal centered environments and the built environment in neighborhoods. To give you one concrete example that we take for granted, when you walk up to a, at, on the cor, on a street corner there's a pedestrian crossing sign there, and it assumes that you can, you walk four feet. Per second with an aging population you need to make those adjustments and those pedestrian crossing signals to reflect the fact that the average senior citizen only walks about three feet per second. Every house will have to have at least one entryway with zero step grade. If you've been in a newly constructed house today, what will you will notice is that microwave ovens are no longer at eye length, standing up. They're in lower cabinets. Pull out, drop in to accommodate an aging population. If you've been in a CVS drugstore lately, what you may or may not have noticed they've widened the aisles to accommodate an aging population in wheelchairs and the like. They've lowered the heights of their shelves to accommodate an aging population. There's nothing that won't have to change given our aging population and therein lies all of the opportunities to be incredibly entrepreneurial in this space. I think a second area in terms of how do we help seniors. Age successfully in place is, what kinds of, how do we think about making adjustments in the built environment, to help and facilitate successful aging in place. What we like to point out is, is that in the future, children's playgrounds won't be the issue. We're in an era of declining fertility, and we've been that way for two decades. In society it will be senior playgrounds and senior fitness parks that are the order of the day. They're very big in Europe now. China has built about 50,000 senior fitness parks, tied to their Olympics in 2008. They're being built in Japan and other places. They are only beginning to come to the United States. Real opportunity, think about, re-engineering the way we design and build our communities and senior fitness parks. Senior wellness facilities become part of the new landscape. We have to think about building for equal opportunity of access. And one of the other things that is tied to this global aging is, is that one of the rapidly growing household types of the first decade of the new millennium was grandparents raising grandchildren. And so we now have to think about how do you build and design spaces for multigenerational families, multigenerational households and, and the like. So we talk a lot about equality of access across the life course and the real opportunities again, are thinking about the built environment and where their opportunities to adjust those environments to assure equal opportunity of access but especially for our senior and aging population. The communities that get that right, that is this aging phenomenon designing what the age, the aging population in mind will highly attractive places to live and do business in the future. Another area I think that there are huge opportunities is Helping, major corporations, literally organizations in the public, private, and non-profit sector. Think about the huge HR challenges they're going to face as a function of an aging population. For the first time in history, we're going to have four generations in the workplace. Everyone from a preboomer born in 1945 or earlier to millennials born in 1980 or later. and, and including boomers, gen x and gen x. All of who come to the workplace with different value orientations, work ethics and the like. When we basically have an HR policy that are one size fits all. And so helping organizations, companies and that are poised to help companies and nonprofit organizations and governments think about how to manage the transition to a multigenerational workplace is real and a huge opportunity. At the same time, helping those companies think about succession planning. There's a group of us called boomers that were born between 1946 and 1964 we're 80 million strong. And we will be turning 65 to the tune of 8000 per day everyday, seven days a week, 365 days a year for the next 20 years. that is the self of tsunami and that is that huge wave of people who will be aging out of the label market. So helping thinking about succession planning, how do you recruit the next generation of talent that is far more diverse then the current generation of boomers and pre boomers who are aging out of the workplace? How do you think about that and help companies develop and create. Globally diverse workforce is, is one of the big challenges. The second big challenge for organizations is the pre-boomers, boomers and even Gen Xers who will be exiting the labor market have accumulated lots of knowledge. Both about success and failure. How do you ensure knowledge succession from those generations to the next generation of workers? That is another big challenge for organizations and most of them haven't thought about it at all. So there are real opportunities for people who are interested in HR kinds of challenges. And companies are hungry for this kind of information at this particular point and time. The another area is for people who are interested in big data analytics. Because everything in the built environment will have to change as a function of an aging population, there's a need to understand where. The risk exists in the existing population, so being able to mine large sources of data to understand where people fall in places, and how often do they fall and what kinds of places are, are, are, you know, vulnerable for, or create. Challenges for a senior population. There are going to be huge opportunities to think about and to come up with estimates, estimates of risks in various kinds of settings. Be they private sector settings, commercial, retail, whatever. Huge opportunities there. It's something as simple as a a door on a hotel room is designed to close forcefully behind you for safety reasons but if you are a senior and a fragile senior. And accidentally stands in front of that door when it closes. It could be a huge, huge problem for you. And so companies are not aware of the enormous risk that they face for, if they don't make the kinds of adjustments in their built environments to accommodate an aging population. Everything has to change, and we're going to see a gr, a big demand for people who have expertise in data mining to identify where those risk are, so companies can make those kinds of adjustments in their workplaces. So anyone who's ge, getting skills in data analytics I think there's going to be a big demand in the future. At the end of the day, global aging is a competitiveness issue for us and, and, the world. We need a viable, Young population that works every day to be able to pay for an aging population. But, and therein lies the opportunity. We need to frame global aging as an enormous opportunity, to create viable businesses, to create jobs in the light that will enable our seniors to age gracefully. It's a form of enlightened self interest, for us and the global market place. It's a win, win kind of strategy for job creation and business development and entrepreneurial opportunities if we look at global aging as just that. A real, real opportunity. And so the, the, the opportunity set, if you will, is wide open for those of you who have the temerity and the chutzpah to move forward in dealing with aging. The reason that it's such an easy problem to address, most of us one way or another, are going to or either currently dealing with these issues, or we will be dealing with them in the future. So, it's a form of con, a light and self interest for us in our country and in our world. For us to leverage the enormous talent that we have here at Carolina and other universities around the world to bring clarity and light to the global aging challenge
