There is an increasing demand for new solutions that promote wellbeing and active ageing due to the ageing population in Europe. This is the point of departure for the StarDust project Active for Life.  The aim is to create and provide innovative, globally competitive and effective trans-national service models and business concepts to maintain or improve the quality of life of the ageing population. Cooperation with the Baltic Sea Region within this area is seen as a way to create a larger home market for the solutions developed, to brand the macro region to individuals and to enterprises and to provide a springboard for accessing global markets such as Asia.

Photo: Karen Beate Nøsterud/norden.org

Active for Life will bring together value-chain actors from the Baltic Sea Region in order to create and strengthen cooperation in research, service development and service provision.  The pilot project will involve expertise in health care, wellness, social services, living concepts, experience business, digital content business, food, ubiquitous computing and health biotechnology.

The pilot project will work with different kinds of methodological approaches. User-driven innovation methods are seen as very important in order to get a holistic view of users (the ageing population) and their future needs. Open innovation methods will be used to gather ideas and competencies from different businesses and organizations in order to create new service models.  

Some of the identified objectives for Active for Life are to:  

• Identify challenges and opportunities when it comes to the wellbeing of the elderly population, within areas where service solutions can be developed
• Activate organizations within the field through different forms of workshops and arenas
• Gather scattered national and regional resources and competencies within the field and to stimulate knowledge sharing and learning
• Develop business and partnership models intended to facilitate transnational cooperation
• Identify and cooperate with target markets in Asia

Partners in the Active for Life Pilot project are Culminatum Innovation Oy Ltd (Helsinki), Aalborg University and the department of Health Science and Technology (North Denmark region), BioCon Valley GmbH (Meckenburg-Vorpommern), Community Relationship Consultants NGO (Vilnius) and New Tools for Health (Linköping).