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.

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