A Digital Collaborative Platform for the Silver Economy: Functionalities Required by Stakeholders in a Multinational Baltic Sea Region Project

This article develops functionalities for a digital collaborative platform, called the Digital Silver Hub, which aims to serve as an ecosystem for the quadruple helix actors (private sector, public sector, academic institutions, and senior citizens) to participate in knowledge exchange, collaboration, and co-creation of innovative technological solutions to facilitate the elderly population. In service of that, we have conducted 30 interviews from the partner heads of an EU-funded project as well as quadruple helix actors from each region in the Baltic Sea Region (Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Lithuania, Denmark, and St. Petersburg) to deeply understand the functionalities that are needed to be offered by the platform. A deductive thematic analysis has been 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. Overall, this article offers insights into the functionalities that are required for a digital collaborative platform to support the elderly population and facilitate co-creation among quadruple helix actors, as well as provides a foundation for future work on designing and implementing such a platform.