60 is the new 16

I am on a mission.

Ever since we kicked off Ignite NEB in 2022, the goal has been to break away from conventional hackathons.

We started by infusing the NEB spirit through the celebration component, the locally rooted challenge, the direct engagement of the community, and the open ended ideation, which shifted the focus from generating fleeting technical solutions to building empowerment through entrepreneurship.

This was the second critical differentiator: we did recognize the importance and invest in follow-up and aftercare. The most obvious way being the Grow NEB incubator programme for the most promising ideas born during the Ignite NEB events. But not only. I am proud and humbled to say that from the latest edition in Copenhagen in 2025 - hosted by cirka cph in Urban13 in collaboration with Meaningful Entrepreneurship - I am still in touch with the majority of the participants beyond the winning teams who are in the 2026 Grow NEB cohort. I have had a number of 1:1s with the people who showed up back in October, which led us to a delightful variety of directions: exploring future collaborations, informal chats, bonding over shared challenges, mutual support, pep talks, expressing solidarity and vowing to continue the capital w Work.

What is still dream territory and our desire for this year is to completely flip the script on who our changemakers are. In the current Grow NEB cohort, we are excited to work with a team of teenagers (Lundens Lys) at the heart of their community. Because that's not a given. Bureaucratically, it is much easier to take the frictionless (read: lazy) route and work with personas neatly fitting administrative boxes. But rarely does impact originate from comfort. So I can say of course! we are up for the challenge to do our part in harmonizing the realities of disruption with the institutionalized goodwill.

We are not stopping here. Our quest for this year is to spotlight 60+ changemakers. Because they have a lot to offer and are commonly overlooked in the innovation ecosystem. Another bone to pick with hackathons is that they rarely acknowledge and invite in more mature audiences. They are glorifying youth in an exclusive manner and miss out on the potential that a late career change holds. We would like to shed light on the immense value decades of experience combined with the freedom to act can bring. Many people in their sixties do not identify with a pensioner lifestyle and are not ready to be shunned into bingo rooms.

This is my new mission: establish innovation and entrepreneurship communities with retirement age changemakers. They have all it takes to be successful: knowledge, clarity, confidence, focus, time. What they need is opportunity.

So I am calling all comrades working on an application for the next edition of Ignite NEB to entertain this idea.