The Longevity Explorers are an initiative of Tech-enhanced Life, PBC.
As a Public Benefit Corporation, Tech-enhanced Life is allowed to combine a “Mission” (like a non-profit) with the focus and incentives of a for-profit company. We think of it as harnessing the best bits of Silicon Valley Capitalism to chip away at some of the more thorny challenges facing society today.
Our Mission is to improve the quality of life of older adults and their families.
Business Model Philosophy: Over time, we anticipate that the learning and collaboration that members of the Longevity Explorers do together will lead to meaningful revenues. Our vision is that these revenues will be shared among those who participate in proportion to the value of their contributions.
Longevity Explorer Activities:
The Longevity Explorers can participate in two quite separate but complementary activities.
- The “Club”: We think of our regular monthly meetings, as “Club” meetings. They are run primarily for the benefit of members, with a goal of generating insights and learnings and a shared sense of purpose. Our secondary goal is to generate insights that can benefit older adults around the world, which we share via the Tech-enhanced Life website.
- Sponsored Explorations: Tech-enhanced Life is actively engaged in providing help to companies that want to create products and services that older adults actually want and will pay a premium for. Longevity Explorers may (but are not required to) join Tech-enhanced Life’s “Sponsored Exploration Panel“, which includes older adults, caregivers, and professionals engaged in aging services as well as Longevity Explorers. Members of the Sponsored Exploration Panel are eligible for invitations to participate in Sponsored Exploration projects, organized by Tech-enhanced Life.
Complementary Business Models:
The two activities above have quite different business models. The Club activities do not generate revenues, and in fact have some modest costs. In contrast, the activity of helping companies generates modest revenues. Over time, we hope to move to an overall blended business model in which these two complementary business models allow the overall initiative to be financially self-sustaining.
Our “Customers”
Our activities are focused on benefiting two groups.
Older Adults and Longevity Explorers:
Since we started in 2014, most of the research done by the Tech-enhanced Life analyst team has been made available for free on our website for older adults and their families. And all of the collaborative learning and exploration by the Longevity Explorer circles has also been made available at no cost. And the regular explorer circle “Club” meetings are run entirely for the benefit of our explorers and other older adults like them.
We hope to be able to continue to provide high quality independent research for the benefit of older adults and their families for free, or at a heavily subsidized price.
Companies and Innovators:
Tech-enhanced Life offers a range of services to innovators and companies wanting to develop better products and services for older adults. These services often leverage the domain expertise of our analyst team, but they also may involve participation by Longevity Explorers, and other older adults who are members of the Sponsored Exploration Panel, as well.
Our philosophy is straightforward. We think these services will be of great value to the companies that engage us, and there will be fees for those services. We structure our engagements so that, if explorers participate, they also receive economic benefit from the engagement.