Stephen Johnston
(photo by Gary Laufman)

For a mobile-focused business entrepreneur, Stephen Johnston (MBA 2002) is more than a bit of a contrarian. Unlike many of his peers, Johnston, 41, has his sights set not on emerging nations but on the developed world, mostly in Europe and North America. He is targeting seniors, when 90 percent of today's marketing spend is aimed at people under 50. And he's hedging his bets on something we all think seniors run from—namely, technology.

It all came together in 2012, when Johnston and gerontologist/strategy consultant Katy Fike cofounded Aging2.0, a global organization whose mission is accelerating innovation to improve the lives of older adults. Much of their early work has been nurturing promising entrepreneurs through the aptly named Aging2.0 GENerator—which provides strategic counseling and access to mentors, pilots, and capital—and a global series of summit-style events that bring like-minded technology and design innovators together with experts in the field of aging. The next step will be scaling the enterprise through local chapters in cities around the world and raising money for its own direct investments.

Johnston likens the growing opportunities in aging to the old high school science lesson of placing a frog in a pan of water and gradually turning up the heat. "Like boiling the frog, it has been happening slowly, but it's increasingly hard to ignore," he says. "There is staggering growth in the 65-plus population in countries like Japan. In a few years, much of the world will be like Florida is today."

Johnston enjoys the big picture and the long view. Born in England and trained as an economist at Cambridge University, he moved to Brussels to work with the European Commission, the governing body of the newly formed European Union. He later became EU director of Transatlantic Business Dialogue, a forum for European and American companies to overcome barriers to trade.

But after nearly five years, Johnston realized he wanted business exposure, too. "As a European, I was very aware that American business schools were the place to learn business," he says, "and Harvard was my first choice. I was attracted to the case study method because it was very different from how I had been educated in the past."

Johnston found the HBS technology courses eye-opening. "There was an element of precision, but most of what we talked about was how companies had made significant changes in the world," he says. "Using technology as a mechanism for scaling ideas was one of the most useful things I learned."

After HBS, he put that knowledge to use in his six years at Nokia, creating global networks to make change through mobile technology, much of which was still in its infancy. That, in turn, led to an experience working with a wealthy family in medical philanthropy searching for a cure for a rare dementia, and the idea for Aging2.0. "This combined my interest in trends with a desire to do something meaningful in business beyond making money," says Johnston. "I was looking for a significant market opportunity, something that I was interested in personally, that was impactful and that was doing good in the world."

The common thread running through all of Johnston's ventures today is quality of life.

"Our longer life span is a gift from technology," he says, "but it's more than just living longer. That's the quantity; we're working on the quality. If you work at understanding the causes and triggers of degeneration—thinking in a holistic way about what happens to the body during aging—you can apply that knowledge to a whole range of diseases."

Beyond health and medical advances, says Johnston, "there are huge possibilities for new products and services [see sidebars], but business needs to change its mentality about aging. With innovation will come opportunities, but only if you can see them."

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