Children are fantastic little learning machines. They are hardwired to play with ideas and absorb knowledge. Adults, alas, are not. That is why the challenge of adult education and lifelong learning is more difficult – and ultimately more important – than childhood education. Societies that are serious about raising their standard of living should focus on enhancing the productivity of parents rather than boosting teenage test scores.

The economic rationale is clear. Ageing populations of Europe, China and North America increasingly enjoy long and healthy lives. Yet as they grow older, wealth creation depends on the ability to acquire and convert information, skills and technologies into new value. In this environment, hard-won expertise, rather like expensive capital equipment, often depreciates with astonishing speed. The cruel “human capital” jibe, that many workers do not have 20 years’ experience but one year’s experience 20 times over, has assumed new poignancy.

The premise that quality education during life’s first two decades matters more than for decades four and five has become literally counterproductive. Demographic realities and dynamic economies have made “ageing adults” today’s most underappreciated – and underappreciating – capital asset class.

Improving returns on that asset requires neither great sums of money nor greater flights of imagination. The key is to rethink and reorganise how busy but anxious adults can benefit from education and training opportunities. Technology makes meeting that challenge far more affordable, entrepreneurial and compelling. Adult education is a market ripe for rapid global transformation.

The internet is a paradise for auto­didacts. The intellectually curious can find doctoral dissertations on virtually any subject in any language, download seminars podcast from the world’s great universities and leading professional societies and view YouTube lectures by Nobel laureates ranging from the physicist, Richard Feynman, to economists such as Milton Friedman and Muhammad Yunus.

You need no creativity to picture how this growing wealth of multimedia material may be repackaged and customised for adult education courses . Organisations of all sizes can bundle their own blogs, webcasts and digital simulations as training tools to serve employees and job applicants. Why not invite candidates to participate in online training sessions to see how well they learn? Follow up the next day by texting them “pop quizzes” to test retention.

In truth, technology is the simpler part. Harder questions revolve around training. What markets in skills, training and knowledge work best for both enterprise and employee? Productivity matters. If enterprise education and learning are not cost-effective, outsourcing, offshoring and automation will be seen as superior investments. If acquiring skills does not make individuals more valuable, training is not worth it.

Opportunities for companies to redefine their economics of human capital development are expanding enormously – from customer support training via mobile phone to multi-user Xbox-like simulations of factory design. New genres of training must emerge. “Just-in-time” learning facilitated on the internet will have as big an impact on industry as Toyota’s lean production system.

Making these market opportunities open and accessible is essential. Organisations, both public and commercial, should be encouraged to put non-proprietary education, training and assessment programmes online. The global adult education market would be revolutionised if Toyota, Tata, Germany’s Fraunhofer Institutes, General Electric and the US agriculture department’s extension service made their learning content available.

Even more important, however, would be having companies disclose in detail which mid-career education and training programmes generated the best recruitment and most rewarding results. Market mechanisms that stimulate rigorous public ranking and rating would be a global good, just like today’s online searches and auctions. Indeed they would challenge outdated accreditation and certification practices, which are crying out for innovation.

Universities are not anachronisms in these emerging markets. In the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “open courseware” initiative, professors post classroom materials online for anyone to use freely. Asian universities have begun to use technology to reach out to working adults.

But schools have traditionally seen adult and continuing education as awkward institutional fits for their mission. Even the UK’s Open University – arguably the world’s best “distance learning” institution – roots itself firmly in academic tradition rather than adult education. For-profit schools such as the University of Phoenix have proved more adaptable, if not more creative. There will be plenty of partnerships here.

In these scenarios personal initiative, rather than government intervention, is the essential ingredient for invigorating ageing human capital. But adults should be able to make better investment choices if appropriate opportunities are available.

What better way to demonstrate education’s importance to children than having them see adults studiously participate in the global learning marketplace?

The writer is an innovation researcher with MIT’s Sloan School and a visiting fellow at Imperial College London