The Chaeum Care Biz Lab

  Author's Note This is Part 2 of the five-part series “When Does a Home Become a Place of Care?” The series traces how care has moved from being primarily a family responsibility into the market, and how products, industries, labor, and technology have increasingly become organized around the homes of older adults. In doing so, it examines how the global longevity economy—where healthcare, housing, daily living, culture, and technology intersect—has evolved, and how the care supply chain may be reshaped in the years ahead. The Series Part 1. Buying Care — When Care Leaves the Family and Enters the Market Part 2. Care Products Coming Home — What Do People Buy for Care at Home? Part 3. Care Industries Moving Toward the Home — Who Is Knocking on the Older Adult’s Door? Part 4. Care Work Coming Home — Who Will Provide Care, Where Will They Come From, and Under What Conditions? Part 5. How Will the Care Industries Around the Home Be Reshaped? — The Next Shape of the Home-Centered Care...

   Author's Note This is Part 1 of the five-part series “When Does a Home Become a Place of Care?” The series traces how care has moved from being primarily a family responsibility into the market, and how products, industries, labor, and technology have increasingly become organized around the homes of older adults. In doing so, it examines how the global longevity economy—where healthcare, housing, daily living, culture, and technology intersect—has evolved, and how the care supply chain may be reshaped in the years ahead. The Series Part 1. Buying Care — When Care Leaves the Family and Enters the Market Part 2. Care Products Coming Home — What Do People Buy for Care at Home? Part 3. Care Industries Moving Toward the Home — Who Is Knocking on the Older Adult’s Door? Part 4. Care Work Coming Home — Who Will Provide Care, Where Will They Come From, and Under What Conditions? Part 5. How Will the Care Industries Around the Home Be Reshaped? — The Next Shape of the Home-Centered Car...

  Where Market Dynamism Meets Public Value: The 'A Plus for All' Equation Is the market really the opposite of public value when it comes to care? Or, rather, in a super-aged society, could a more realistic solution be for the state to assume social responsibility for care and establish basic rules, while allowing diverse private providers to use the market to create new services and supply chains? And if care is, by its very nature, a relational good, is it not inevitable that care businesses recognized and sustained by the market will evolve in ways that simultaneously increase care-recipient satisfaction, enable the sustainable participation of care workers, and support provider growth? This essay begins with these questions. It moves beyond the conventional framing of public value and the market as opposing forces and explores the possibility of a new combination: public value setting the direction of the market, and market dynamism expanding the supply of care and generat...

For International Readers   Korea’s Self-Sufficiency Support Program is a work-linked welfare system for low-income people. Self-Support Enterprises are businesses developed through this program to promote work integration and self-sufficiency.  Author’s Note The Self-Sufficiency Support Program, which has built work communities for people experiencing poverty, marked the beginning of Korea’s social and solidarity economy movement and has served as a driving force behind it. Over the past twenty years, I have worked as a social worker, a startup support practitioner for Self-Support Enterprises, and at times as an entrepreneur myself. It has been a process of countless challenges and responses. Combining welfare and business is nowhere near as easy as it sounds — it is, in fact, close to impossible. Yet this nearly impossible task is what we have been doing for the past twenty years. Over that time, we have developed the Self-Sufficiency Support Program into a highly sophisticate...