The one about AIE Nordics getting invited to Almedalen and an englishman getting roasted
Once a year Swedish political life relocates to Visby to meet and mingle for a week. What started in 1982 as a pop-up talk initiated by former prime minister Olof Palme (in order to buy a few more days of sun and vacation before going back to Stockholm and an awaiting election), has turned into a huge garden party. Such a high density of politicians will for obvious reasons attract businesses that target support to public organisations. The market can be worth literally hundreds of billions.
I received an invitation to partake in a dialogue about “How technology may support elderly care”, hosted by Tunstall Nordic a while ago. I was still Innovation Leader for the Department of Social Care and Nursing in a Swedish city at the time of invitation, but my situation changed during the spring. I joined the Applied Innovation Exchange (AIE) at Capgemini that services the Group Nordic business and customers, so I arrived in Visby as this new team’s Emerging Technology Innovation leader. No one seemed very upset over my false flag operation thankfully and Capgemini was very cool and welcoming.
The dialogue included representatives from Vårdföretagarna, TechSverige, Tunstall and Hammarö municipality and the topics covered digitalization, welfare tech and the need for collaboration. I must confess that I was a little worried that I would end up in a confusing attempt to cover two set of chairs — as the consultant on a global company on one hand and as civil servant on the other. However, given the right perspective there is much more that unites than divides us. Good elderly care is in everyone’s interest, and if there is something that continuous comes up in discussion, it is that “we cannot do it ourselves”. Another reoccurring theme is that “today’s situation” is not sustainable, and we need to find new ways of working.
No wonder, the demographics paint a very clear picture! For each day there are fewer giving care and more needing it. We are getting older, which is a good thing, but in order to keep running things the way we do, we´d need 27% of today’s 12-year-olds to choose a career in caring and nursing when they grow up. The chances for that must be considered slim.
Graphs like the one above are often used to show that we are heading for a fall. But there is comfort to be found here as well. The graph was designed by English scholar Thomas Malthus back in 1798. The basic idea is that there is so much love in the world that food production (linear) will not be able keep up with population growth (exponential) and we were all supposed to starve to death by 1924. Clearly, he did not consider the waves of industrial revolutions that were about to sweep over the world (albeit at a highly uneven rate) and the innovations they brought with them.
Today, as we face yet another Malthusian catastrophe, we should note that there is an extremely well-timed fourth industrial revolution in full swing. Data and robotics will likely impact and pave the way to solve today’s demographic challenges just like fertilizers and did back in the 19th century. So, we need to be brave and take the leap into this data-driven society. We need to avoid doing nothing because we don’t understand how to both innovate and leverage data under GDPR or the DPA to alter the future history of humanity.
