The 14th of March, the ICT4SILVER consortium held in Brussels a workshop that marked the end of 30 months of work.
The topic was how to support the SME in the Silver Economy market?
The population of Europe is undergoing a drastic change in its age structure. With people living longer than ever before and lower birth rate, our population, is becoming steadily older. This situation is particularly the case in in the South West of Europe. By 2070, over half of the European population is predicted to be 65 years old, 12% over 80yo.
This demographic change not only has to be managed as an economic and societal risk but also has an opportunity. An older population means to help them stay in charge on their own life, living as they want, for as long as possible, and where possible, to contribute to the economy and society. This objective is the one shared by all the actors claiming to be part of the Silver Economy.
Silver Economy actors aims to answer the needs the elderly population, the informal care givers and the formal one. They are form various sectors of activity, medical care, social care, mobility, housing, e-health, wellbeing etc.
But it’s not as easy as it sounds. The Silver Economy is a difficult market for an SME in terms of segmentation of a market, diversity of the distribution channels, lack of digital accuracy.
The question we ask ourselves during the ICT4SILVER project is how to help the SME form our territory to have a faster and easier access to market?
We shared during this workshop with the participants a part of the ICT4SILVER results. And also to put some light on others economic development tools or initiatives that are replicable on your territory.
In fact, for us, even if the problematic is a common one in Europe, we think the answer to it will be territorial.
The speakers were:
- Pedro Almeida, Executive Director fo Fraunhofer that presented the different difficulties the SME were facing in the Silver Economy Marlet
- Valentina Margiotta, from Autonom’Lab, that talked about the usage study methodology the ICT4SILVER project developed and how it can help identify the last adjustment that need to be made on a product before launching it
- Joseph Pucek, form Clubster SANTE presented the seas2growth project where they developed a strategic guide and a route market online toll to helm SME finding the right path to success in the Silver Economy
- Aurélie Lolia from AFNOR that talked about voluntary standard as a the way to maintain the lead a SME have on its market.
Then, Pedro Roseiro form Cluster TICE that will present you the Alliance Living Lab/ Cluster we have imagined in the project, that could be a possible framework of intervention for those different tools.
The conclusion of this event as been made by Eurico Neves and Antonio Remartinez our external evaluators of the project. They highlighted the necessity to keep working, us economic development actors, on the topic in order to be ready for our SMEs for when the market will be mature.
If you miss the event you can enjoy the presentation here
