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Failure is not something most senior living operators want to experience, but they should embrace it when it happens.
Senior living operators should be willing to green-light investments in tandem with seeking new partnerships in the name of improving operations.
Innovation is a nebulous word that can mean many different things and putting it into practice is more difficult with long timelines. But creating a space that furthers research or creates new partnerships will help bring new ideas forward in addressing lingering challenges operators face, and I think operators shouldn’t be afraid of mistakes along the way in order to take those risks.
Duarte, California-based senior living provider HumanGood, is a good example of this philosophy at work. The provider recently partnered with the Buck Institute for Research on Aging to study older adult aging at HumanGood communities through lab-based research on aging, chronic illness and the mechanisms that drive decline or resilience in aging. This builds on a partnership the company formed in 2020 that allows HumanGood employees to earn a college degree online through a partnership with the University of Arizona Global Campus.
To CEO John Cochrane, it’s important to invest in innovation to understand a new consumer.
“Part of that investment in innovation is not just putting resources of both people and capital into that,” he told me. “That’s also important, but it’s also changing our approach to how we think about operations. Meaning, we’ve got to be willing to fail at some things.”
Budgeting for innovation is tough, but waiting for a perfect proof of concept before moving ahead with a new idea may leave companies behind as consumer expectations and resident needs evolve.
HumanGood’s recent partnership with the Buck Institute stems from the launch earlier this year of the Novato, California-based nonprofit biomedical research organization’s Healthspan Horizons initiative, which is meant to address “one of the most urgent challenges in modern medicine: How to measure, understand and extend healthspan,” according to the organization’s website. This pressing need comes as people are living longer, but are often managing a number of chronic health conditions, and evidence suggests that tenets of healthy aging are “changeable.”
Through the Healthspan Horizons project, the Buck Institute will create a platform that pairs real-world data from older adults’ lives and their interactions with wellness amenities like fitness wearables, sleep, activity, nutrition and lab testing. The goal is to create a “uniquely powerful” and long-term dataset that shows what “drives human healthspan over time,” according to the Healthspan Horizons project.
The industry has a wealth of aging and health-related data, while research universities and institutions need access to more datasets, especially as it relates to understanding aging. This puts senior living in a unique position to potentially improve external partnerships and fund innovation efforts along the way.
I see partnerships like HumanGood’s as a test of senior living’s overall identity in the years ahead. Operators and their communities offer real-world opportunities that research institutions can’t replicate; vice versa, the industry cannot measure up to the research prowess and funding provided to efforts in higher education.
In this week’s subscribers-only SHN+ Update, I analyze recent efforts operators have made in aging research and creating partnerships to offer the following takeaways:
- Examples of successful partnerships
- Why the senior living industry must be willing to fail in 2026
- How innovation could help spur changes in operations
- The future lies in innovation, aging research partnerships
‘Value in learning what doesn’t work’
For an industry built around consistency, safety and high-quality care, embracing experimentation can feel uncomfortable. But avoiding risk altogether can carry its own cost. Providers that are unwilling to pilot new programs, explore new partnerships or rethink established operating models may struggle to keep pace with the changing consumer and the growing complexity of aging services.
Evanston, Illinois-based not-for-profit senior living provider Mather formed the Mather Institute in 1999 to expand the organization’s impact beyond Mather communities through research, improve aging services and wellness offerings and identify senior living trends.
The Mather Institute maintains partnerships with Northwestern University, Harvard University and NORC at the University of Chicago to combine Mather’s expertise in aging, wellness and senior living with institutions capable of furthering aging research. The Mather Institute regularly conducts studies and brings research into practice to evaluate new programming and services and find new trends, according to Catherine O’Brien, who is the Chief Transformation Officer at the Mather Institute.
“Our goal is to generate evidence that can help inform decision making, improve resident experiences and support innovation across the organization,” O’Brien told me.
Mather recently launched a wellness technology pilot program with residents, and in 2025, the organization partnered with a company to develop a “social robot” to serve as a future engagement opportunity for residents in assisted living and memory care, with residents giving feedback that “helped inform future development.” Mather is also evaluating off-the-shelf technologies, like wearable fitness trackers, to better understand what older adults find “useful, engaging and easy” to use in their daily lives as they age.
“Many residents are interested in trying new tools, and we view these pilots as an opportunity to learn alongside them,” O’Brien said.
These partnerships have helped Mather build expertise and access to complement the organization’s daily operations. Recently, the Mather Institute partnered with a company on a pilot program with GenoPalate for collecting DNA samples to identify biomarkers of chronic disease. The program also shares “community-level” nutrition insights with food and beverage staff that “makes it easier to introduce” new initiatives and engage with residents, O’Brien added.
These types of partnerships take investment. They require funding, time, resources, strategy and leadership commitment. They may also involve uncertainty. Not every research collaboration, operational pilot, or new service model will create immediate results. But each effort can generate insights that help providers better understand residents, improve quality of service and identify more effective ways to support aging.
This recognition that funding research and innovation involves uncertainty is vital, O’Brien told me, noting that “not every project will produce results you expect.”
“But an unexpected finding isn’t necessarily a failure,” O’Brien told me. “There’s value in learning what doesn’t work or challenging assumptions, and those insights help organizations make better decisions and ultimately move the field forward.”
This is the mindset the sector needs more of going forward. An unsuccessful pilot that doesn’t scale or a partnership that doesn’t meet anticipated results should not be viewed as a wasted effort. It will give leaders clearer evidence about what residents desire, what staff can support in daily operations, and how an organization can improve in the future.
Helping smaller organizations find scale, innovation
Smaller senior living providers are at a disadvantage when it comes to leveraging the scale that larger providers bring in operations and staffing, a disadvantage that also extends to funding for future research and innovation.
Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based GardenSpot Communities has relied on a cooperative senior living model to help support affordable senior living options for older adults that can’t afford a traditional community or want to live in a community that is anchored on social connectivity. All co-op units are full with a waiting list. The company recently opened The Exchange in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is an adaptive reuse project of an 1890 eight-story building into senior living through a three-way joint venture with a family office as the investor, GardenSpot as the operator and a nonprofit development firm as the project manager.
The co-op model and new development were all born out of what it means to create “longevity-ready” communities, Lindsey told me. In 2022, the organization launched The Wisdom Project in connection with Elizabethtown College and Ursinus College, connecting GardenSpot residents with college students where older adults spend eight months in writing, reading and discussion to capture their life stories and lessons. The second phase pairs older adults with college freshmen in an elective class to be mentors for students.
GardenSpot also partnered with the Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing at NYU to develop a designation of excellence for providing person-centered long-term care.
These efforts to formalize intergenerational learning and mentoring through higher education partnerships are central to GardenSpot’s goals of creating an elevated lifestyle and greater longevity for older adults, CEO Steve Lindsey told me.
“We’re realizing we’re not an incredibly large organization, and there are a lot of different groups out there that are mission-focused and want to serve people well,” Lindsey told me. “If we can join together and work collaboratively instead of competing with one another, we can serve a lot more people.”
I think avoiding risk altogether carries its own cost. Operators that resist or refuse to test new programs or operating tactics may maintain the status quo in the short term but become less apt to meet the demands of an evolving senior living future.
Rising acuity and growing consumer expectations around quality of care are already making some operators think differently about their operating models. For example, Brea, California-based Insight Living is piloting a voluntary genetic health study across its 26 communities to find out if residents have specific biomarkers associated with elevated Alzheimer’s dementia risk.
Insight Living is also keen on building new partnerships through the company’s Integrated Senior Foundation, Principal Bryan Ziebart told me. The foundation has partnered with Stanford University to advance AI tools for earlier detection of Alzheimer’s disease and neuropsychiatric risk detection, and with the University of Pennsylvania’s Sync Labs to deploy an in-room AI system that helps staff anticipate resident needs in nighttime safety and morning care tasks. The partnership with Stanford extends to using research to build tools aimed at slowing cognitive decline and extending the healthspan of older adults.
These examples from GardenSpot, HumanGood, Insight Living and Mather show that there are a growing number of providers willing to take risks in the name of innovation.
I believe more operators should consider where they can contribute through resident data, pilot programs or university partnerships.
