Designing A Digital Collaborative Platform for the Silver Economy: Inception and Conceptualization

Abstract

The silver economy presents a vast realm of potential that has emerged as a consequence of pronounced demographic change specifically in the developed countries. There has been immense research and deliberation especially by the European Union (EU) and the Baltic Sea Region (BSR), to meet the challenges posed by the ageing population. The OSIRIS project is one such initiative to develop a collaborative digital platform which we call as the Digital Silver Hub (DSH) that aims to incorporate the quadruple helix actors (public sector, private sector, academic sector and the end-user) to facilitate the development of technological solutions for the silver economy. In this paper, an initial set of requirements is identified and, based on that, a consolidated concept of the platform is elaborated. In service of this, a total of 22 interviews have been conducted and analyzed using tool-based thematic analysis. Interviews were taken from the quadruple helix actors already involved in the project to help set a general scope and direction of the platform. Based on the results, the initial functionalities were identified which were then validated with the project partners and, therefore, led to groundwork to generate a plausible vision and mission statement for the platform.