Introduction: the co-constitution of ageing and innovation within European policy

Ageing is everywhere these days. It has firmly been established as an overarching theme in different strands of European policy. For instance, it has featured prominently among the European Commission's (EC) initiatives to tackle societal challenges and foster innovation (EC, 2010; European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP AHA), 2011). As a result, old age-policy is often made in conjunction with other policy domains. Here, ageing is mostly seen as a societal problem or challenge that should be solved by way of health-related policies and new assistive technologies (Lipp, Reference Lipp2019; Peine and Neven, Reference Peine and Neven2019).

This state of affairs is often bemoaned by critics, since ageing is merely co-opted as a justifying background to policies that are essentially about stimulating economic growth and technological innovation, and not about older people. While we, in principle, concur with this diagnosis, we also see instances where ageing makes a difference with regard to those policies, a fact often overlooked by such critiques. Hence, we argue that some assumptions in European policies have, at least, been troubled by their linkage with ageing. This may constitute a new opening for reflecting on and pushing for the progressive potentials that ageing, both as an empirical phenomenon and political concept, might have vis-à-vis common rationalities of European policy.

For this, we follow an approach that aims to specify the links and interfaces through which formats of ageing are co-constituted with innovation policy (Lipp and Maasen, Reference Lipp and Maasen2022; Peine and Neven, Reference Peine and Neven2021). Using the example of the European Silver Economy, we want to show not only how ageing can be reframed under the imperatives of economic and innovation policies, but how ageing can also affect those policies. Here, we focus on the European Silver Economy discourse and its particular framing of ageing and older people as it has been absorbed within the wider array of EU digitisation and industry policy. Its main tenet, that ageing constitutes an investment opportunity and not only a drain on public health-care resources, has, in our eyes, shifted some of the common assumptions in the European ageing and innovation discourse.

In the following, we will take the European Silver Economy as an entry point for such an, albeit explorative, investigation. After introducing the origins and rationale of the Silver Economy, we tease out links between ageing and innovation along three main junctions: (a) ageing populations and economic growth, (b) older people and consumption and (b) ageing futures and technology. In these three junctions, we find indications of how the Silver Economy breaks with common assumptions of Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA) policies while at the same time further carrying its baggage. In the next step, we explore the progressive potential of ageing that we view as untapped in current discourses of the Silver Economy. We conclude with an outlook of what such progressive potentials could mean for critical research and future policy.

How European policies talk about ageing: the case of the Silver Economy

European policies on old age have been based on the notion that technological innovation is ‘our best means of successfully tackling major societal challenges’ (EC, 2010: 2), such as demographic ageing. In the mid-2010s, a specific policy field emerged within the wider AHA domain – the European Silver Economy. The Silver Economy focuses on older people as a new class of consumers that promises to bring new growth to European economies. It has not fully evolved into a policy field or agenda of its own right, but its main tenet – that ageing constitutes an investment and business opportunity, and not only a drain on public health-care resources – has continued to be a theme in the umbrella of EU policies on active and healthy ageing (EC, 2020, 2021a). In what follows, we analyse the emergence and consolidation of the European Silver Economy as it happened between 2014 and 2018. This period is relevant and interesting because it allows us to understand how the co-constitution of ageing and innovation policy occurs ‘in action’, as French philosopher Bruno Latour would say (Latour, Reference Latour1987). By this we mean that we focus on documents from a stage of the Silver Economy when its various elements were not yet fixed, in order to understand how they became realised and how they could have been realised otherwise. Hence, we argue that the Silver Economy was mainly formed during that time period, which has shaped how the Silver Economy is nowadays taken up in AHA policies. This approach allows us to analyse the Silver Economy as a set of fluid assumptions about how population ageing, consumption and economic growth can be brought together.

Ageing as a driver of political alternatives: what difference could it make?

Our discussion of the Silver Economy Strategy highlights how this format holds some crucial components that may potentially help shift those overarching rationales usually associated with old-age policy. In this section, we thus hypothesise what would happen if we indeed took ageing more seriously as a potential resource and driver for re-thinking established political rationales. We will briefly explore this in terms of the three key concepts that have hitherto remained unquestioned within European policy discourse: economic growth, consumption and technology futures. In other words, we explore what would happen if we went beyond the promising but still limited perspective on ageing within the European Silver Economy as it has manifested itself today.

The Silver Economy has striven to change the political register in that it sees ageing not only as a challenge but also as an opportunity, as a potential new market and, hence, a source of new economic growth. However, such a response still holds on to the general mantra that growth must at all cost remain a political priority. Ageing can only constitute an opportunity in that it contributes to it. We argue that this configuration of ageing in economic policy underestimates the potential of ageing as a solution rather than a problem. Here, the current pandemic denotes a telling example. If anything, it has laid bare society's dependence on reproductive labour by nurses and teachers, parents and cashiers. Feminist economists have long called attention to the invisibilised labour mostly provided by women (Folbre, Reference Folbre1995; Chen et al., Reference Chen, Vanek, Lund, Heintz and Jhabvala2005). Additionally, ‘grandparent carers’ (Kanji, Reference Kanji2018; Cantillon et al., Reference Cantillon, Moore and Teasdale2021) play a crucial role in sustaining many of the multigenerational relations and networks that have come under strain in the pandemic. Ageing is not a challenge in this context but, on the contrary, it serves as a crucial resource for fostering societal resilience. Seen from this perspective, ageing could very well be the catalyst par excellence for alternative modes of consumption and (re)production (Jackson, Reference Jackson2009; Kallis, Reference Kallis2018). After all, ageing might provide alternative resources and pathways to achieve goals such as innovation or welfare (Rose, Reference Rose2020). Thus, allying feminist, post-growth and old-age policies enabling and fostering care and more sustainable consumption by older people might constitute a new productive interface for thinking about positive visions of ageing.

The Silver Economy limits the role in which older people can contribute to society: as consumers. Again, this configuration of older people shifts some of the alarmist and ageist claims about old age, but it also remains within a purely economic register by focusing on older people's market relations and their economic contributions. Incidentally, the Silver Economy is mainly interested in an economic concept of consumption that mainly focuses on the act of buying, in the development of new marketable products and in fostering the industries that would provide such products. Older people are relevant within such policies as demand, i.e. as an aggregated sum of people willing to pay for certain products. However, such a perspective overlooks a crucial, additional aspect, which is well established in the sociology of consumption: consummation (Baudrillard, Reference Baudrillard2012). Put simply, consummation refers to the ongoing process of using and domesticating a certain consumer object, instead of simply buying and expending it. As age and innovation scholars have pointed out before (Oudshoorn and Pinch, Reference Oudshoorn and Pinch2005; von Hippel, Reference von Hippel2005; Peine and Herrmann, Reference Peine and Herrmann2012), the notion of consummation highlights that consumers are not just passive ‘adopters’ of (technological) products. They also define, through diverse practices of domestication and use, what the product in question becomes. Take, for example, the case of the electric bike (Peine et al., Reference Peine, van Cooten and Neven2017). The electric bike was initially marketed to older consumers because of their alleged need for assistance during bike rides. But rather than simply adapting the clumsy early version of electric bikes, the diverse use practices of older people served as an experimental milieu for testing different designs of the electric bike. In effect, older consumers thus acted as early adopters revealing and paving the way for electric bikes as both assistive and fashionable – before such products diffused among younger consumers. Older people thus enabled a more sustainable and a healthier alternative to the transportation modes it often replaces, notably the car or the train. It is not our point here that older people necessarily have to or always can fulfil this role of an early adopter in the diffusion of innovation. But the case of the electric bikes shows the limitations of seeing older people exclusively as ‘lagging behind’ younger, ‘normal’ consumers. Being more sensitive to specific practices of domesticating and using technological products may open up new ways of considering them more actively in old-age policies as drivers of progressive socio-technical change.

Finally, a crucial element that glues together the concern of ageing and growth are technology futures (Neven and Peine, Reference Neven and Peine2017). Here, it is especially high-tech, digital, assistive devices that are positioned as a panacea to demographic ageing as well as a driver of the goals of the Silver Economy (e.g. EIP AHA, 2017: 13). As described above, the conception of technology within the Silver Economy is heavily infused with assumptions from the AHA discourse configuring older users as deficient beings in need of prosthetic technologies and policies (Callon, Reference Callon, Pinch and Swedberg2008). We argue that this view of ageing and innovation is limited in at least two ways: on the one hand, it puts too much emphasis on high-tech, ‘prosthetic’ innovation and, on the other hand, underestimates older people themselves as producers of age-related technology. The Silver Economy is a field dominated by entrepreneurs and technologists that emphasise future returns in terms of competitive advantages and the exploitation of new markets (Adam and Groves, Reference Adam and Groves2011). However, such visions of technological innovation persistently fail to deliver what they promise (Peine and Neven, Reference Peine and Neven2019; Maibaum et al., Reference Maibaum, Bischof, Hergesell and Lipp2021). Paradoxically, it is often technology too overtly developed ‘for older people’ that is most resisted (Neven, Reference Neven2010). We argue that a lot of this has to do with an unjustified insistence on high-tech solutions to older people's everyday ‘problems’. By contrast, if policies on ageing would take older people seriously as producers, there are interesting alternative routes as to how they develop and habituate technology in use as well as in design. For instance, Bergschöld et al. (Reference Bergschöld, Neven and Peine2020) have shown that do-it-yourself gerontechnology, as it is improvised and co-created by older users themselves, might help paint a more complete and, incidentally, more sustainable picture of what kind of care technologies are needed in an ageing society. Here, ageing is not simply an attractive testbed for high-tech innovation and investment but rather constitutes a playing field for frugal and low-tech innovation (Govindarajan and Trimble, Reference Govindarajan and Trimble2012; Radjou et al., Reference Radjou, Prabhu and Ahuja2012). An ageing society could thus help constitute a society of care, maintenance and repair (Graham and Thrift, Reference Graham and Thrift2007; Jackson, Reference Jackson, Foot, Boczkowski and Gillespie2014; Puig de la Bellacasa, Reference Puig de la Bellacasa2017) that resists the lure of disruptive innovation. As a result, such a productive view on older people as innovators would also shift the lopsided focus on prosthetic technology and policy. Instead of adapting older people to the rationale of a productive, neoliberal citizen, such a view would place emphasis on the ‘adaptation of the world and particular situations to these individuals’ (Callon, Reference Callon, Pinch and Swedberg2008: 46). Hence, what if we thought about innovation along the lines of how they may support and sustain older people's environments in such a way that they can experiment, co-create and, indeed, care for others (López Gómez, Reference López Gómez2015)?

Outlook: new avenues for questioning and re-wiring the link between ageing and innovation

To sum up, we argue that both policy and research on ageing and innovation benefit from a co-constitutive approach that explores the ways in which ageing may re-configure the core concepts and assumptions that have hitherto shaped European policy. Such a positive, co-constitutive view on ageing might help construe the forward-looking question of what kind of society is not only enforced but also enabled by ageing. Ageing thus becomes agentive itself as a process of socio-political transformation opening up avenues for both critical enquiry and progressive politics. Here, the Silver Economy denoted a first, but never fully realised, sign for how ageing can be understood in a more positive light than before. However, our analysis also shows that longstanding ageist, economic, techno-centric rationales of this discourse persist and have ‘domesticated’ the Silver Economy narrative. Thus, we argue that in its current form, European policies still underestimate ageing as a policy field in its own right. Hence, this article should be read as a call for policy makers to engage with the agency of ageing both as a fruitful policy concept for new ideas and as a driver of social change. This might be a valuable complement to other, more direct ways of influencing policy makers' and public preferences.

We think that a speculative outlook on what difference ageing could make in policy yields fruitful impulses for common gerontological critiques of the ageing and innovation discourse. Such critiques have often focused on debunking ‘wrong’ ideas about ageing. However, such a strategy underestimates the power of the concept of ageing itself. We argue that ageing should not be viewed in terms of an ‘alienated’ object but rather as a concept that has the potential of altering political debates and rationalities even though it might have ageist connotations. We are hence focusing on ageing as a kind of undercurrent of dominant tropes of innovation and economic growth. Such a view does not assume essentialist notions of ‘ageing’ and ‘industrial policy’ but rather attends to their mutual shaping, i.e. their co-constitution (Peine and Neven, Reference Peine and Neven2021). We argue that this might not only be a more realistic but also critically productive view on current issues and challenges of an ageing society. It would offer a new perspective on fostering new links between old age, older people and ageing futures. In order to both question and re-wire existing links between ageing and innovation, critical researchers, practitioners and policy makers might thus be better equipped insisting that ageing policy must be or, indeed, is progressive policy.