Silver Markets and Business Customers: Opportunities for Industrial Markets?

Peter Mertens, Steve Russell and Ines Steinke
Additional contact information
Peter Mertens: Chief Technology Office
Steve Russell: Siemens Corporate Research
Ines Steinke: Corporate Technology

Chapter Chapter 26 in The Silver Market Phenomenon, 2011, pp 353-370 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Demographic change will pose distinct challenges for companies. The ratio of people over 65 years of age will rise in all triad countries. At the same time, the number of younger people, and thus recruits in all education levels, will drastically decline in Japan and Germany. In the USA, a shortage of highly skilled and educated workers is expected. The employment rate of aged people will therefore rise. Companies can react on many different levels. On the one hand, they can make it a business opportunity by developing and selling products and services that support older people. On the other hand, companies will have to cope with fewer younger workers. We discuss several ways to do this (1) to prevent loss of skills from retirement, (2) to accommodate older workers, and (3) to survive with fewer workers. These could lead to Business-to-Business (B2B) products and services that can help companies to solve the issues involved. We look at these possibilities in turn, and find that they each lead to ideas that have one or more of the following properties (1) they are actually Business-to-Consumer (B2C) products, (2) they are management or organizational solutions or services, and/or (3) their benefits are not specific to older workers but benefit all employees. Thus, we are led to the conclusion that the technical products best suited for the B2 Industry silver market will not be “silver-specific” products, but products “designed for all” with an emphasis on usability and problem solving.

Keywords: Knowledge Management; Baby Boomer; Business Opportunity; Young Worker; Product Lifecycle Management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-642-14338-0_26

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783642143380

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-14338-0_26

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().