by Intergenerational teams can be a powerful driver of innovation, productivity, and long-term success. By creating a culture that values and embraces an all-aged workplace, employers can tap into workers’ unique strengths and perspectives at any age while leveraging complementary strengths between employees.
What Intergenerational Innovation Looks Like
In one crowdsourcing experiment, gamers of all ages–from middle school to self-described grandmothers–were challenged to configure ways to fold proteins and RNA. Understanding the folding gave scientists insights into how to fight disease since the functions of proteins and RNA in our body depend on how they are folded.
The collaborative work of people across the world, all ages, races, religions and abilities were able to solve in three weeks what scientists had been unable to solve over 15 years.
The University of Washington
The University of Washington created the project, noting the emergence of skilled players without a biochemistry background providing solutions. Three-quarters of them had little or zero experience. The big takeaway was that this intergenerational team of gamers beat protein subject matter experts, demonstrating how easily skills transfer across professional job functions.
Looking Outside the Box
When amongst their many skilled mathematicians and engineers, NASA was unable to find a better way to forecast solar flares to protect astronauts and satellites in space and power grids on Earth, NASA turned to crowdsourcing. The outdated model used for 30 years provided a four-hour lead-time with 50% accuracy when determining whether radiation from a solar flare would reach Earth. They pitched the problem as a data challenge and invited problem-solvers with analytic backgrounds to use their 30 years of space weather data. sought.
The solution came from a semiretired radio-frequency engineer living in rural New Hampshire. He created predictive algorithms to develop a forecasting model that provided an eight-hour lead time and 75% accuracy. This represented quite an improvement over the previous NASA model and is another example of why employers should consider looking for strong talent by thinking outside the box–even if the talent lacks specific experience.
Age does not determine the potential to contribute, whether youngers are looking for their first professional career role or olders are looking for opportunities to continue working. If a talent pool only has candidates between the ages of 25 and 40, the pool is blind to all-aged talent.
If your company is challenged to attract and retain talent, a good look at policies and practices aimed at the youngest and oldest talent should give you a good indication of where to start. To mobilize, maintain and maximize all-aged talent, the first step requires a hard look at hiring, training, promotion and retention practices. If there are age gaps, you’ve found an opportunity.
Age Equity Alliance is a US-based nonprofit working globally to build best-in-class workplaces for people at every stage of life. AEA focuses on age-neutral practices, talent sustainability, and the systems that shape access to opportunity over longer working lives. Contact us for more information.
Related analysis by the author appears regularly in Forbes.
This article draws in part from a previously published article by the author in Forbes (March 2025):
“How To Mobilize, Maintain And Maximize All-Aged Talent.”
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