President’s Summary


A better future for our elderly M


ike Biddle takes over as President of AALA from Professor Lena Gustafsson at the end of 2011,


leading the programme into its most exciting phase yet, a time when results start to emerge and we see the real impact the work is starting to have on the elderly in our society. But, happy though Biddle is with progress so far, speaking after the Forum had closed he concedes that there is still much to be done.


How did you find this year’s forum?


Really interesting – I think some of the themes that are coming out seem to be quite cross-cutting and there seems to be general agreement that we need to be moving on from technology and products and start thinking about systems and services. The main theme has been social innovation, the business of innovation and the chain management that we need to put in place.


We need to consider what we should


aspire to have in the future to allow people to live independently the way they want to. And we need to start to pull that through in terms of what that will mean, because everyone’s going to have to change a little bit and if we can work out how we are going to change we can then work out what systems and services we need to support that. When we understand that better, we can work out what will come in in terms technology and products to enable that. That’s the common message.


Up till now, there has been a focus on products with AAL, so how has this sea change come about?


People have been looking at some of the demographic trends and thinking about what we need to do through the AAL JP and other programmes like the European Framework FP7 as well. And we’ve started to think about how some of these can come together. So, instead of saying ‘if you had this technology, what would you do differently’, you say ‘these are things that are coming so what will you do differently and how can we have that conversation’.


We are almost at a tipping point where


people see that we do need to do something different and it’s starting to get past the research technology push and


14


Mike Biddle, the incoming president of AALA, is optimistic about the future


we’re thinking about the market pull. That will happen more as the word spreads. There’s quite a community around it but they’re the people who knew it was coming and now they need to be looking to reach out.


You talk about research and product push, surely that’s what AAL JP’s been about, how does AAL fit into market pull?


The AAL Joint Programme has always been about trying to connect the innovation space beyond the research base, so instead of more research it was always trying to apply the research and move things onwards into the market. If something finishes it shouldn’t just be ready to be put in a box and go, but it should be at a point where you know it can scale up and roll out at volume. There’s common talk across this sector


about the need to move past pilots and demonstrators, and that’s just what we’ve been doing. There’s have been lots of good examples of this across Europe, but nothing that’s gone to scale yet. So now we’re at the point where we can start thinking about how do you go to scale? AAL has always been at that point where its starting to pull things through a bit more, so instead of looking at things that are ten years into the future, it is looking at things that are two to three years out there. In a nutshell, AAL has always been more


focused on how to drive the innovation forward as opposed to research for its own sake.


Another critical theme that seemed to emerge from the Forum was the need to engage across the generations as we look to address the challenges we face with our ageing society. Would you agree and if so, how can we involve everyone?


That is right, we do need to do more and should all start by involving ourselves in this process and ask ourselves not ‘what do they want’ but ‘what do I want?’. I look at my retirement date about 30 years from now and I hope we will be doing things a lot differently then. We ran a challenge in the UK, which


involved school children and older people. One young boy stood up one day


AAL Forum 2011


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