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Businesses target graying population

NEW YORK - The baby boomer market is so lucrative that entrepreneurs are literally competing to capitalize on it.

At the 2005 Boomer Business Summit, held last month in Philadelphia, 40 contestants vied for a $10,000 prize in the Boomer Business Plan Challenge. The finalists ranged from a company that makes a high-tech knee brace to a low-tech moving company.

The competition was organized by Santa Clara University, the American Society in Aging and Mary Furlong, a consultant to businesses that want to market to older people.

The stakes for the contestants are huge - more and more money is in the hands of people who are likely to spend on reading glasses rather than the latest computer game. People older than 54 had more than twice the net assets of younger people in 2001, according to the most recent Federal Reserve data.

And they have needs that businesses have overlooked, according to David Yarnell, one of the judges at the competition. Yarnell said teenagers and young adults are well served, so entrepreneurs should be focusing more attention on the needs of older people.

"It's not as sexy, but people are realizing it's a very, very powerful marketplace," said Yarnell, managing partner at venture capital firm BEV Capital in Stamford, Conn.

Here's a look at four of the finalists:

Millions of seniors have trouble walking because of diseases like Parkinson's, injury, surgery or just plain age. So engineers Kern Bhugra and Robert Horst developed the PowerKnee, a motorized brace that fits over the knee, and won the $10,000 top prize.

The device, still in the prototype stage, uses sensors along the leg to figure out the wearer's intentions, then starts its powerful electric motor to help the movement along.

"It really takes some of the load off the quadriceps and puts it on the device," Bhugra says.

To make the PowerKnee small enough to fit under clothes, Bhugra's small company, Tibion Corp., plans to use a patented motor with sliding, electrically charged plates which fit flat along the leg.

Bhugra said the PowerKnee could be on the market in a year and a half, provided Tibion, based in the San Francisco area, finds funding. It would probably cost $5,000 to $6,000.

Moving is tough when you've lived at a place for 40 or 50 years, particularly since that often means moving to a retirement home or apartment where you have less space. A new industry has popped up to help out: senior move managers.

Margit Novack of Wynnewood, Pa., founded Moving Solutions in 1996 and has 20 affiliates in other cities. She hopes to expand through franchising.

"There is no national brand out there, so I think we have chance to position ourselves as sort of the gold standard in the industry," she says.

The tricky thing will be marketing to customers. Novack has to tread the fine line of selling the concept without spelling out that it's essentially for the elderly.

"People do not want age-related marketing," Novack says. "Certainly, I know that our 95-year-old clients don't like to be called "older.' "

In 1994, Beth Sanders interviewed her grandmother about her life, and realized the connection she established with past generations of her family was a rare thing in the modern age.

"People are so spread out," Sanders says, "and parents and grandparents know a lot of information about their parents and grandparents that never gets passed along."

The Marysville, Ohio, native turned that realization into a business idea, creating a Web site, www.lifebio.com that walks customers through creating a life history of their parent by asking questions such as how he or she spent a summer day as a child. They can also upload pictures.

The finished product is a digital file that can be downloaded and printed. For an added fee, Lifebio will print it as a hardback book.

The site launched in 2001 and has had 4,000 customers. Sanders said she hasn't done much marketing, but that will change this year.

Oskar Jonsson, an Icelandic wholesale shoe salesman, has spent four years and his life savings to develop a way to cast shoe soles infused with grains of silicon carbide, a tough mineral similar to diamonds.

The "Green Diamond" soles give two to three times more traction than conventional soles, even on ice and oil. That grip doesn't lessen appreciably as the sole wears, because new grains of silicon carbide are revealed as the first ones are worn off.

The application is obvious. In 2000, falls among the elderly caused 10,200 deaths and 1.6-million emergency room visits in the United States, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Jonsson adapted the soles from an Icelandic technology for winter tires.

[Last modified April 20, 2005, 02:56:36]