The Who once sang, “I hope I die before I get old.” Despite their best efforts to exit the planet early, most of them didn’t. They and their fellow Baby Boomers represent the greatest technology and business opportunity of the 21st Century.

It is typical for each of us to be drawn to areas for which we feel the most affinity. For that reason, most students looking forward see themselves surrounded by people of a similar age while they conjure up products and services attractive to their peers. I teach an MBA class at the Haas School at U.C. Berkeley and so many of the students have great ideas on how to innovate in areas deeply relevant to their day-to-day worlds. The problem is: that is not where the action is. If you are a student today preparing to be the Steve Jobs or Oprah of the next generation, you should be thinking a lot more about what your parents and grandparents need than what would interest your friends.

There are approximately 76 million baby boomers (people born during the years 1945 and 1964). The first of the boomers turns 65 years old in 2011 at a rate of approximately 10,000 people per day, and that trend will continue for the next 20 years. According to the Census Bureau, an estimated 72 million people, or 19.3 percent of the population, will be 65 and older by 2030, compared with 40 million, or 13 percent last year. By 2030, people aged 18 to 24 will represent 9.1 percent of the population, down from 9.9 percent in 2010, according to the Census Bureau. The share of people aged 25 to 44 will drop to 25.5 percent from 26.8 percent. Young people: it is time to start thinking old-you are outnumbered. The best thing you could possibly study is how to conceive of technologies, products, and services that would appeal to the aging demographic—that is where the spending and trending power will reside. “No other force is likely to shape the future of national economic health, public finances and policy making,” analysts at Standard & Poor’s wrote in a recent report, “as the irreversible rate at which the world’s population is aging.”

According to various reports, Boomers already control over 80 percent of personal financial assets and more than 50 percent of U.S. discretionary spending power. A MetLife study shows Boomers stand to inherit over $11.6 trillion in their lifetime in addition to the incomes they make, and the vast majority of Boomers expect to work through their retirement. Boomers already comprise over half of all consumer spending and yes, while they account for over 75 percent of all purchases of prescription drugs and a whole lot of chronic illness (itself a stunningly large business opportunity), they also account for about 80 percent of all travel purchases.

For those of you who think of the Boomers as old and out of touch, note that retirees age 65 and older are the fastest-growing group of social networking site users, according to the Pew Research Center, which adds that over half of baby boomers use social networking sites. If you think that the latest and greatest technology doesn’t apply to the older crowd, you are wrong. New technology is essential to finding ways for Boomers to maintain their vibrancy and independence, as well as ways for us to reduce the skyrocketing costs in our current healthcare system, something that all economists agree is essential to maintaining our national economic viability.

Accordingly, students today would be best served by studying the fields that swirl around and intersect with the fields of gerontology and geriatrics. This means everything from the study of aging in medicine to the study of architecture, engineering and finance as it applies to the Boomer opportunity.

The future of caring for older Americans lays in technology, with vast green field opportunities available in the design of technologies and services that enable extending health and psychiatric well-being. Just one area, Alzheimers’, today costs the U.S. $172 billion annually; by 2020 this cost will be $2 trillion and by 2050, $20 trillion according to recent reports, and that is just one disease that needs innovation, both in treatment and in patient management.

Beyond healthcare, there is a screaming demand for technologies that ensure mobility, enable physical and financial autonomy, provide for social connectivity, and deliver education and work-place skills to those who are looking to their second or third career. People of a certain age don’t want and often can’t use the same products and services that appeal to the young, but also don’t want to buy things that make them feel old. Striking that balance is the innovation opportunity of the next several decades.

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Randal Charlton, who recently announced he’s stepping down as TechTown’s executive director to lead a program aimed at assisting baby boomers who want to become entrepreneurs, has just been awarded the 2011 Purpose Prize. This annual $100,000 award honors social entrepreneurs over 60 who use their experience and passion to effectively address societal challenges. Charlton was one of five winners nationally.

“I am humbled and honored to have been selected to receive the Purpose Prize award, which I owe to the entrepreneurial spirit of the people of Detroit and the team I have worked with at TechTown,” Charlton said in a press release. Before leading TechTown, Charlton was instrumental in starting 14 companies. During his tenure at TechTown, the incubator was transformed from a nearly empty industrial building into a thriving entrepreneurial hub that supports more than 250 companies, having trained more than 2,200 entrepreneurs.

On Tuesday, Charlton transitioned to his new role as executive in residence for BOOM! The New Economy, a TechTown-affiliated venture that offers training, one-on-one mentoring, and internships to people over 50 exploring second careers as entrepreneurs.

According to new research released by Civic Ventures, a San Francisco-based think tank devoted to boomers, work, and social purpose, approximately 25 million people—one in four Americans ages 44-70—are interested in starting businesses or nonprofit ventures in the next five to 10 years. The research, which was funded by the MetLife Foundation, also found that compared to aspiring entrepreneurs in this age group without a social mission, these potential “encore” entrepreneurs are more likely to be women, African American, involved in their communities, and motivated by faith. Older entrepreneurs also start businesses with a more local, regional, or state focus (67 percent) as opposed to national or international, and two out of three report they need $50,000 or less to get started.

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Wayne State University’s business incubator TechTown announced today that current executive director Randal Charlton has stepped down to transition into a leadership position with BOOM! The New Economy, a new program supporting the Baby Boom generation’s reinvention as entrepreneurs. Leslie Smith, TechTown’s current general manager, will take over his position starting Nov. 1.

TechTown was established in 2000 when Wayne State, General Motors, and the Henry Ford Health System created a business and technology incubator, hoping to create an engine of economic growth both in Southeast Michigan and across the state. TechTown, which currently hosts about 250 companies,  provides incubation and acceleration resources that include space for lease, coaching, mentoring, educational workshops, and access to talent and capital. Charlton, an Xconomist, has been TechTown’s executive director since 2007.

“In a sense, I’m not going anywhere,” Charlton says, noting that TechTown is a collaborator in the BOOM! program. “Every eight seconds, someone in the United States is turning 65. The issue is, are the baby boomers part of the probelm, or part of the solution? What we’re doing is developing a series of support systems for older adults who aren’t ready to retire…like myself.”

Charlton says the program will encourage baby boomers who want to be active in the nation’s economic recovery to get involved in three areas: establishing a startup, being a mentor, or becoming a “senior intern.”

“We’ve already started the senior intern program on a trial basis, and it’s worked quite well,” Charlton says. “It gives them hands-on experience working with members of Generation X and Generation Y, and their different approach to doing business.”

Also planned is an “encore” business plan competition where baby boomers will have the chance to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs. Charlton points to data from the Kaufman Foundation that found more companies are being started by those over age 50 than those under 30.

“Above all, I want Detroit to lead the way toward reinvention for the rest of the country,” Charlton says. ”The notion that all entrepreneurs are Mark Zuckerbergs is not entirely correct.”

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When is an eon only half a decade? When you’re talking about Eons, the social networking site for baby boomers launched in 2006 by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor. San Francisco-based media services company Crew Media, which operates a boomer-focused advertising agency called Continuum Crew, said today that it has acquired Eons and its associated advertising network, Eons BOOM Media, for an undisclosed sum. After raising at least $32 million in venture backing from Cambridge, MA-based General Catalyst and Menlo Park, CA-based Sequoia Capital, Eons proved unable to attract large audiences to its Internet portal, which was dedicated to “celebrating life on the flipside of 50.” The company spun off its more successful obituaries business, Tributes.com, and ultimately shrank to just five employees after a round of layoffs last November.

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ConforMIS, an orthopedic device maker in Burlington, MA, said today it is introducing the third product in its line of implants designed to make knee surgery less invasive. Made to order for each patient based on data from CT or MRI scans; these implants replace only the areas of the knee showing signs of osteoarthritis. By sticking to the affected areas, the surgeon can spare ligament and bone that would be cut in conventional knee surgery, which ought to help preserve the joint’s range of motion, ConforMIS CEO Philipp Lang explained when Rebecca profiled the company and its minimally invasive strategy back in November.

As probably anybody who watches or likes to play sports knows, knee surgery is pretty common. About 500,000 to 600,000 people every year in the U.S. end up getting the most serious form of surgery, total knee replacement. The number will continue to grow as the Baby Boomers keep getting older. ConforMIS’s latest implant, called the iDuo, could provide an alternative to full-blown surgery for patients with arthritis in just two of the knee’s three compartments; an implant that the company launched in February, called the iUni, is designed for patients with damage in just one compartment. One-third to one-half of patients who currently undergo total knee replacement only have arthritis in one or two compartments, said Jong Lee, senior vice president of marketing, in an e-mail.

Interestingly, ConforMIS has its eye on Generation X every bit as much as the Boomers. Since knee replacements don’t last forever, surgeons are looking for alternatives for younger patients. “The iDuo provides a less invasive alternative for young and active patients that maintains their ability to move to a total knee (replacement) in the future if necessary,” said CEO Lang in a statement.

ConforMIS doesn’t disclose how many salespeople will be pitching the iDuo, although the company has a “rapidly expanding direct salesforce as well as distributors” who will carry the product, Lee says. If they end up capturing any significant percentage of the $5 billion market for knee replacements, I’m pretty sure we’ll hear a lot more news from them.

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Last September Bob broke the story that Reed Sturtevant, the longtime chief technology officer at Eons, Boston’s social networking site for the 50-and-over crowd, had accepted a job heading up a new Cambridge, MA-based development lab and innovation group for Microsoft. Sturtevant’s departure came shortly after Eons had laid off a third of its staff and cut several under-performing sections of its website.

But Eons has now filled the CTO vacancy, hiring Eric Golin, a “serial engineer” who has held the CTO posts at Content Objects, a compliance and risk management support company in Cambridge; Argo Technology, a Newton, MA, company that developed unified information management tools for consumers; and Broadvision, an e-business software provider based in Redwood City, CA.

“I’m getting very close to 50, and the baby boomer social applications space we’re after is very exciting for me,” says Golin, who will have responsibility for Eons’ technology platform. “A lot of the people I talk to have a profile on Facebook or LinkedIn, but those are communications tools, not really environments where people of my age group want to connect and engage outside the work environment, or to really find something that energizes them and adds to their life. There is a huge opportunity to build that kind of online community focused on spirited baby boomers.”

Golin says he was already doing consulting work for Eons when Sturtevant announced his departure for Microsft and has been handling parts of the CTO role ever since. He says the technology team at Eons has been focused on building up the community-networking aspects of the site, which customers said were more important to them than now-defunct features such as obituaries.

“One of the things that was very critical back in September was recognizing that what the customers really wanted was this online community, the social networking aspect, so we’ve been working very hard to focus all of our efforts and resources into that area,” says Golin. “I’m excited about the applications we’re building, we’ve got a great team, and I like having the chance to do something that feels meaningful to people. And with 700,000 users, we’re at a very good starting point.”

At the same time, Eons announced the appointment of a new design director, Tom Churchill, who will provide creative direction for the Eons website. Churchill is a veteran of Boston social media site Gather.com and travel distributor World Travel Holdings, where he led efforts to build e-commerce software for travel brands such as Expedia, Orbitz, and Yahoo Travel.

“It’s really exciting to have Eric and Tom as part of our team at Eons,” Jeff Taylor, Eons’ founder and CEO, said in the company’s announcement about the hirings. “They both know what it takes to create a fun and fulfilling experience for online users. Their combined talent and knowledge will play a key role in the next phase of Eons as we continue to deliver the best platform for boomers who want to keep in touch with their friends, rekindle old relationships, and create new connections with like-minded adults who share their passions, interests and experiences at this stage of life.”

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Eons, the upbeat web portal for those on the “flip side of 50,” has been feeling the vagaries of age—young age, that is. Despite amassing $32 million in venture capital, the 15-month-old (depending on how you count) startup has experienced severe growing pains and in September was forced to lay off a third of its staff—and it’s been busy reshaping its identity ever since. The company is now spinning off its original bedrock Obits section as a new business—Tributes.com—and Eons itself will formally debut anew in January as it evolves from a more general collection of resources into what might be thought of as Facebook or MySpace tailored for the baby boomer crowd.

Or, as founder Jeff Taylor puts it, “The epicenter for Eons is 50, whereas the epicenter for both MySpace and Facebook is teens, 20s, 30s. And so as we evolve, there’s the possibility of a peer-to-peer network for people in their 50s, people at similar life stage and experience, people that understand ‘me,’ and a place I can call my own. That’s our goal and our role, I think.”

I got the skinny on all this last Wednesday from Taylor when I visited the company’s funky fourth-floor headquarters in Boston’s Charlestown Navy Yard. The HQ is a quasi-attic space with sloped roofs, exposed brick walls, and worn leather chairs mixed in with newer stuff. The whole place, somewhat like Taylor himself, emits a fun, quirky, hip-yet-down-to-earth vibe. Everyone works late on Wednesdays—they typically have dinner together—so folks can call it a week at 1 p.m. on Fridays. “I always wanted to do that,” Taylor told me.

It was a wide-ranging conversation that covered Taylor’s career, his experience founding pioneering online job site Monster.com (where his title ran, “founder, president, CEO, chairman, and chief monster”), the ideas behind Eons, the travails of the site, and his plans for the future. The recent cutbacks had been hard, and Taylor was pretty candid about losing some of his core advertisers as well, but as usual, he was upbeat. “I am extremely bullish on where our company is today,” he told me. “But I’ll be the first one to say we don’t have all the answers. We just have an extremely interesting challenge, which is how to galvanize the baby boomer online energy.”

Eons, which debuted on July 31, 2006, grew out of a couple key observations Taylor had as the oldest baby boomers (the post-WWII generation born between 1945 and 1965) moved past the half-century mark in age. One, he explains, was that “there was no media focused on the 50-plus space. No radio, no TV, no print.” What’s more, hardly any businesses, on the Internet or otherwise, really focused on serving this economically powerful group. “About the only thing with traction that [had] existed in the marketplace for over 50 years was AARP,” says Taylor.

Enter Eons—or kind of. First there was a thing called raising money, lots of money, which Taylor ultimately did primarily from two giants of venture capital, Sequoia Capital on the west coast, and General Catalyst in Cambridge, MA. (Other investors include Intel, Charles River, and Humana). The funds came in two stages, a $10 million first round in January 2006 (the company actually formed in September 2005, nearly a year before the website debuted), and a $22 million Series B financing that closed in March.

A key to remember in this whole story is that Eons is largely a reflection of Taylor’s personality—energetic, enthusiastic, and, yes, optimistic about the future. Taylor himself is still only 47, and he’s been chided for being too young to use his own site. But when it comes to believing that hitting 50 is no reason to slow down, he’s got it right. He tells a story of visiting venture capitalists seeking initial financing. “I saw the folder for my idea on one of the VC’s desk here in Boston, and it said, ‘Golden Years’ on it. That was the broad perception of what I was working on. And there was no way it was ‘Golden Years’ to me.”

Instead, Taylor chose to celebrate aging. “Let’s Live to Be 100 (or die trying)!” is one of his slogans. And, of course, there’s his trademark “Boom, boom, boom” phrase, which you might have seen him belting out on TV ads. Another way he sums up Eons’ ethos: “If you’re interested in retiring and drying up like a raisin, we’re not the place for you.”

Optimistic energy spewed out of the site from the start. There’s been some fine-tuning over the last 15 months or so, but from day one Eons served up a tableau of broad categories that appeared as circles atop the home page, each bearing names like “fun,” “love,” “money,” “games,” and “obits.”

Inside these offerings users could find a variety of activities and tools tailored for the flip side set, including Boomer Trivia and brain games designed to stimulate (and I guess counter aging in) different lobes of the brain. There’s a popular Longevity Calculator that both calculates your current life expectancy (based on lifestyle and history) and suggests ways for you to extend it. And, at least in the first stage of its evolution, the site was populated by lots and lots of short 200- or 400-word articles, what Taylor calls “light touch editorial,” on things like quitting smoking, swimming with dolphins, or walking your way to good fitness.

And in some ways, at least, it worked. The site now has some 600,000 registered … Next Page »

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