Professor Dr. rer. pol. Frank Piller
Frank Piller is a professor of management and head of the Institute for Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) at RWTH Aachen University and the Institute for Management Cybernetics (ifu e.V.), an institute affiliated with RWTH Aachen University and an AIF research center.
Prof. Piller, innovations are regularly developed for the “xplus” age group. You were born in 1969 and are therefore part of the "50plus market". Do you feel like a market participant, a member of the “50plus” target group?
100 percent not! I have never felt like a participant in a specific market. Through my extensive research on the subject of individualization and mass customization, I know that it is often not the socio-demographic characteristics, i.e. age, gender, place of residence, etc. that determine a consumer, but what we call involvement. Interest in a topic, how important it is to us. And that's really age independent in a lot of ways.
How do you rate this orientation towards the (chronological) age? Is this the path to suitable offerings, or are there other characteristics developers should look to?
Above all, developers should focus on the unsolved problems of the customers. The question is: What are their latent problems? There are bound to be problems related to age, e.g. being physically restricted. But again, not all people are the same. And one of the greatest wisdoms of success in innovation management is to see where there are unsolved problems that are often not even noticed by the customer. It is not without reason that the idea of universal design exists. A design, a good product concept that makes it useful and applicable for everyone who is in the target group.
If you look at products dedicated to seniors, "big buttons" and "barrier-free" solutions regularly catch the eye. In your opinion, do developers have a too one-sided image of “age”, an “age bias”?
This is an interesting question that I, as a scientist, cannot answer unequivocally because there are no relevant studies. But I do believe that it is very often young people who develop products for supposedly older people and who then focus on the limitations caused by old age. On the other hand, you can see that very many older people do not buy these products when they are free to choose, but instead buy products that are closer to them, even if these products were developed for supposedly younger people. But basically, products or developers have a bias because you have an idea of who you are developing for. A good solution would be not to see older people in the company as too expensive or too cumbersome, but to actively involve them in the development, perhaps even as the head of the development team. Why? Because then, if they develop products for themselves, they may also develop better products for the market out of bias.
Co-creation and user innovation are established processes. Do these methods also work to develop products for older people?
Yes of course. The question is actually inappropriate, because we have already established that there is no difference between products for old and young people. So all methods are equally suitable. We also know that many products, regardless of age, market or country, are created by frustrated users. Frustrated users can be old or young, male or female, or whatever. Co-creation and user innovation are methods to involve these people, to give them a platform, e.g. through an ideas competition, an online or offline hackathon or other formats in the LivingLab, and that also works completely regardless of age. Perhaps a basic rule in innovation management also applies here: really successful products and co-creation processes are made by interdisciplinary teams, and interdisciplinarity means not only different disciplinary, i.e. functional backgrounds, but also different levels of experience in life. As a 50+ professor, I learn a lot of new things from my students, but at the same time I hope that my students can also learn something from me. Together we are better and we can do better research, and I think the same is true for co-creation.