A Digital Collaborative Platform for the Silver Economy: Functionalities
Required by Stakeholders in a Multinational Baltic Sea Region Project
Abstract
With the increasing population of the silver economy, many potential
economic opportunities appear, in particular, in developed countries.
Recently, the European Union and the Baltic Sea Region have been very
active with their research on active aging and to tackle the challenges
arising from the exponentially increasing ageing population. The OSIRIS
project is one such EU-funded initiative to develop a digital platform
for the elderly named the Digital Silver Hub, which aims to serve as an
ecosystem for the quadruple helix actors (private sector, public sector,
academic institutions, senior citizens) to participate in knowledge
exchange, collaboration and co-creation of innovative technological
solutions to facilitate the elderly population. In this paper, 30
interviews were conducted from the partner heads of the OSIRIS project
as well as quadruple helix actors from each region in the Baltic Sea
Region (Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Lithuania, and Denmark) in order to
deeply understand the functionalities that are needed to be offered by
the Digital Silver Hub. A deductive thematic analysis is conducted to
analyse these functionalities in terms of Collective Intelligence (CI)
components (namely staffing, processes, goals and motivation) based on a
most recent generic CI model. The functionalities were further evaluated
by experts working in the field of science and technology in the silver
economy. As results, the needed functionalities are identified and
explained in depth. As an outlook, we discuss how these functionalities
can be translated into architectural components of a system design.