Are older people less innovative?

Laetitia@Work #61

Hi everyone,

I love to dive into subjects at the intersection of ageing and work (as you can see in this newsletter or this one). The old three-stage life (first, training, then work and finally, retirement) made us associate different ages with specific life and career stages in a linear way. With each age came rigid expectations. And in a context where each age is rigidly matched with a life stage, age really is shaped by these expectations.

Although more and more people today have a multi-stage life filled with multiple transitions (more training phases, career breaks and changes, multiple jobs), the old model hasn’t yet fully disappeared. In fact, both models (the 3-stage life and the multi-stage life) coexist, just as different visions and realities of age coexist. Chronological age, biological age and social age are distinct subjects, which makes the whole thing very complex.

Are older people less innovative? I’d love to just write “older people can be exactly as innovative as younger people and age doesn’t matter” and just leave it at that (it’d be less work too!) Plus, I’m really convinced we can maintain and develop plasticity and “agility” at any age provided we keep learning, challenging our assumptions, trying new things and continuing to have projects.

But age does matter. And the way age is viewed also matters. I may not have a definitive answer to the question “Are older people less innovative?” but I find it provides an interesting opportunity to question both age and innovation. Indeed what does it even mean to “be innovative”? Why is it framed as the solution to everything? Why are older people generally expected to become incapable of innovating? 

Here are a few thoughts on age and innovation 👇💡

Are young people just smarter?

When he was in his early twenties, Mark Zuckerberg famously said “Young people are just smarter”, which made everyone over 30 angry. (Now that he’s (nearly) 40, he doesn’t say it anymore). This was a time when Silicon Valley was spectacularly ageist and the cult of youth was at its peak. Also Silicon Valley was still fairly young. Being “smart” meant challenging the status quo, solving new problems, analysing data in new ways and attacking “older”, more established incumbents. So there are social and economic elements involved in Zuckerberg’s statement.

How are intelligence and innovation related anyway? Problem-solving abilities and analytical thinking are often regarded as essential components. But knowledge and expertise in specific domains also are. Innovation can come from interdisciplinary thinking in a way that’s not directly related to intelligence in a traditional sense. Creativity can be supported by intelligence but the two aren’t synonymous. Innovation also depends on the drive to bring something to fruition and the ability to collaborate with others to make it happen.

In short, intelligence does play a role in innovation but both intelligence and innovation are so multifaceted as to make the relationship with age very murky. When it comes to age and intelligence, some people point to the distinction between fluid and crystallised intelligence.

• Fluid intelligence refers to the ability to solve problems in novel situations without using prior knowledge. It’s characterised by adaptability and the capacity to learn new concepts quickly. It involves skills like abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and drawing inferences. Fluid intelligence typically declines with age, starting in early adulthood and continuing as people grow older.

• Crystallised intelligence on the other hand is this aspect of intelligence that pertains to the knowledge and information that a person has acquired throughout their life. It involves skills such as vocabulary, general knowledge, and expertise in specific domains. It tends to increase with age since individuals accumulate more experiences, learn new information, and refine their expertise in various areas.

So the young and the old do have different forms of intelligence, different combinations of the fluid and crystallised components. Intelligence involves both. Problem-solving and creativity depend on both.

In aggregate there’s reason to believe that we are naturally inclined to become more intelligent as we age. The brain maintains its capacity for growth throughout our lives, at least until our later years when cognitive decline may become a factor. Consequently, our skills, both technical and interpersonal, tend to progress with time, provided we continue to practice. Indeed we develop stronger and more numerous connections between the two hemispheres of the brain which could enhance our lateral thinking ability, the technical term for our capacity to forge links between more distant concepts. This helps to innovate.

But intelligence is only one piece of the innovation puzzle.

The three types of innovation according to Clayton Christensen

Renowned innovation scholar Clayton Christensen distinguished between three types of innovation. (We owe him the phrase “disruptive innovation”) What’s interesting about this typology is that there may be a varying propensity to engage in these three types of innovation depending on your age, or rather your life stage.

• Efficiency innovations focus on improving processes and operations within an organisation. They aim to optimise internal workflows, reduce costs, and enhance productivity. They involve deep process knowledge and experience. One would be tempted to say that older people (with a lot of experience in the domain in question) are in a better position to nail efficiency.

• Sustaining innovation aims to improve existing products or services within established markets. It typically involves incremental improvements and enhancements to meet the evolving needs of current customers. It generally involves capital, which older people have more of.

• Disruptive innovation refers to the introduction of a new product or service that initially targets underserved or non-existent markets. These innovations are often simpler, more affordable, or more convenient than existing solutions. They tend to emerge at the low end of the market and gradually gain momentum, eventually displacing established competitors. Because they start at the margin, they’re associated with new entrants who have nothing to lose and are willing to challenge the status quo. Younger people generally have more reason to want to do that. They are less likely to suffer from the Innovator’s Dilemma.

Perhaps Silicon Valley was so obsessed with youth because it focused so much on disruptive innovation. What Zuckerberg believed was that younger people are more likely to want to take risks, as underlined this (old) Forbes article:

There is one talent that does decline over time—our willingness to take risks. For evolutionary reasons, risk-taking peaks between the ages of 17 to 27, then drops off precipitously. And this brings us to a strange truth: What Zuckerberg is really saying is that risk-taking is so important to business success today, that it is better to sacrifice the improved skills, enhanced problem solving abilities, and considerable emotional control that comes with age, for the risk-philic-ness that is a by-product of youth.

In short there’s reason to believe that outsiders and new entrants (most of whom are young) are in a better position to disrupt things while the old may have a strong incentive to want to improve (incrementally) what they already have (and use their acquired knowledge and experience to do so).

But is that really so? It’s unclear. Indeed older new entrants may be better equipped to bring about disruptive innovation with stronger networks and more capital (acquired elsewhere). In older countries, studies show older entrepreneurs are in fact more innovative than younger ones because they have higher means and because they are more numerous. French newspaper Les Échos reports on a study that reveals the link between age and innovation is not what we believe, and it's time to dispel the myth of the young innovative entrepreneur because "those over 50 could be the most radical innovators."

By exploring a database containing 2,900 founders of new businesses in Germany between 2008 and 2017, we found that, on average, the probability of a founder introducing an innovation to the market increases by 30% for every 10-year increase in their age. Entrepreneurs nearing the end of their careers are thus more than three times as likely to introduce innovations to the market compared to the overall sample average.

In terms of revenue, an additional ten years of age results in an annual increase of approximately €35,000 in revenue generated by innovations, which is about 26% higher than the sample average for the oldest age group. The positive impact of founder age on new products and/or services continues up until retirement.

Age effect, generation effect and historical period

When we talk about age, we often tend to mix a lot of things. I've already mentioned chronological, biological, and social age, for example. But there's also this confusion we entertain between age effect, generation effect, and historical period effect. Yet, this distinction is crucial. 

• Age effect refers to the impact of a person's age on certain characteristics, behaviours, or outcomes. It focuses on the changes that occur within individuals as they grow older. For example, if a study finds that older adults are more likely to vote in elections than younger adults, this is considered an age effect. Age effect is a factor in a lot of phenomena. For example, 30 to 40-year olds are more likely to have young kids and be less available for certain activities. Another example: people over 70 are more likely to be affected by osteoarthritis. Etc.

• Generation effect, also known as cohort effect, pertains to the influence of the historical and cultural context in which a particular generation grew up. People who belong to the same birth cohort may share common experiences, values, and behaviours. For example, individuals born during a period of economic hardship, such as the Great Depression, may have different attitudes toward money and saving compared to those born during an economically prosperous era. One may wonder if the people who graduated from high school or university during Covid can be said to form the “Covid generation”.

• Historical period effect relates to the impact of major events or social changes that occur during a specific time period. These events can shape the attitudes, behaviours, and experiences of individuals across all age groups. For instance, the introduction of the internet and smartphones had a significant historical period effect on communication patterns and technology usage across all age groups. 50 and 60-year olds who are newly single also use dating apps!

When it comes to innovativeness, there’s probably some age effect. When you’re young you’re more likely to have nothing to lose. You’re more likely to have time to waste because you’re not a caregiver. You network more because you’re single. You form clusters of young people around campuses. (But conversely when you’re old, you have more process knowledge and more access to capital.)

As Nicolas Colin wrote in his newsletter European Straits:

Let's delve further into the underlying causes. According to Zeihan, one factor contributing to the decline of innovation is shifting demographics: the population of individuals in their 20s and 30s is steadily diminishing, and he deems this specific age group essential for fostering innovation.

Intriguingly, this notion seems to resonate with Paul Graham's perspective that to cultivate Silicon Valley-style startups, a critical mass of nerds needs to be present, often congregating around universities—which, by coincidence, predominantly attract people in their 20s and 30s. Notably, Graham doesn't dismiss the potential for older individuals to drive innovation, yet his emphasis on the significance of universities implies that generating a concentrated hub of nerds becomes challenging if they're beyond the typical university age range.

In any case, the discussion on the economic impact of shifting demographics is crucial and I’ll make sure to revisit it in upcoming issues.

There could be a generation effect but probably not. It used to be believed when the internet revolution was still in its infancy that only the young understood internet stuff. But that’s a confusion between generation effect and historical period effect. The internet shaped everybody’s behaviour. Digital natives may have been born with new tech but older people were eventually also shaped so strongly by the new tech that it changed their cognition completely (I’m 45 but I can’t remember pre-internet times when I supposedly could focus on a book without checking things on Google and scrolling my Instagram every couple of minutes. I literally can’t remember.) The young do tend to adopt newer technologies first but it’s not always the case. It’s true that people are shaped disproportionately by the things they learn and experience between the ages of 15 and 25, but when it comes to tech and digital it’s unclear how that tendency implies that the youngest generation is more innovative. (Plus innovation isn’t just tech innovation)

In short it’s quite hard to make broad generalisations based solely on age. Innovative thinking can be found in people of all age groups. The things that could be believed to make the young more innovative —like being a newcomer to a field, having more free time, networking more—are now more evenly shared across age groups. A lot of the markers of age are more evenly distributed across different groups. Older people work longer, change careers more often, create companies, and engage in more learning and training than they used to. In fact, I'm convinced that older people are increasingly bound to innovate.

In fact we should worry more about supporting the young in their innovativeness. To harness the valuable contributions of young people in a society with a decreasing youth population, it is crucial to provide them with more resources: quality education, opportunities to build networks, funding for the businesses they create, and all the infrastructure needed to support their continued innovation tomorrow.

A (feminist) word of conclusion? It's worth adding that debates about innovation tend to be centred on men, much like the illustration I chose for this newsletter. We have examples of male entrepreneurs, male researchers and scientists, and male models of innovation. According to the media, only men are innovative. Young or old but they're (almost) always guys... All of this can lead us to question the definition, visibility, and recognition of innovation presented in the media. There are probably many essential innovations that go unnoticed. And how many radical female innovators were not supported and funded when they could have "disrupted" a market? Is the obsession with innovation not gendered?

It’s the subject of Katrine Marçal’s book, Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men. In it, she highlights how deeply ingrained gender stereotypes continue to hinder progress. Despite women's historical contributions and recent innovations, society still sidelines their ideas and underinvests in female-led ventures. This gender bias limits our ability to find groundbreaking solutions and perpetuates the same tired approaches. Women's innovativeness is a powerful force for positive change. It’s not yet seen that way 😓

👉 See also my previous newsletter: The end of linear work lives: crossings & transitions. Laetitia@Work #22

👉 And this one: Age is malleable. Laetitia@Work #28

💡Check out some of the latest articles in French I wrote for Welcome to the Jungle:

• Turn-over : comment le départ de vos meilleurs talents favorise l'effet domino

• Les syndicats sont-ils devenus le nouveau cool ?

💡 I also wrote this article for Vives Média: Stéphanie, développeuse, change les codes du gaming

🎙️ The latest episodes of my Nouveau Départ podcast are: Les startups, c'est fini ? ; Femmes, réseaux et entrepreneuriat (with Marie Eloy) ; La Reprise (with Thi Nhu An Pham) 🎧 (in 🇫🇷) I also published this article on Nouveau Départ: Les profs démissionnent en masse

📺 The second Welcome to the Jungle CORTEX video was released: Syndrome d’hubris ou quand le pouvoir rend fou

Miscellaneous

😖 Women are always the wrong age, Kelli María Korducki, Business Insider, August 2023: “A new, qualitative survey of 913 women across four disparate industries — law, faith-based nonprofits, higher education, and healthcare — found a dismaying amount of age-based discrimination against women in top jobs. The research, recently published in Harvard Business Review, found that many of the women surveyed reported being at the receiving end of age-related judgment that implied they were unfit for the job.”

🇨🇳 Young People in China Can’t Find Work, and Xi Jinping Has Only One Response, Ho-Fung Hung, The New York Times, September 2023: “If the government does not boost household consumption or ease its grip on China’s private sector, high urban unemployment — youth discontentment — is here to stay. In recent years, many disillusioned young Chinese have joined in an antiwork movement known as lying flat, slacking off as a form of silent resistance. A Peking University economist studying this movement estimated that when those who are willingly lying flat are taken into account, almost half of all Chinese youths may be jobless.”

🤑 Pay Transparency Is Sweeping Across the US, Wired, Caitlin Harrington, September 2023: “Pay transparency laws have recently spread across the US, taking effect in Colorado in 2021, New York City in 2022, and California and Washington states this year. New York state enacted its own law yesterday. But the trend to more openness about pay may also reflect a growing awareness that pay transparency is good for business.”

Keep calm and innovate! Or don’t 😉 🤗