Exploring EU e-Delivery Integration for Enabling Interregional Innovation through the SilverHub Platform

Populations are aging rapidly in the EU, creating significant challenges and opportunities in the Silver Economy. The OSIRIS Interreg Baltic Sea initiative is a response to this aging challenge and is composed of quadruple helix stakeholders in Denmark, Finland, and the Baltic states. An ICT-based outcome of the project was SilverHub.eu, a collective intelligence digital platform that provides users with Silver Economy market reports, partner contact search, and innovation-supporting digital tools. However, it does not contain cross-border data exchange or e-service provision capability, which requires digital interoperability architecture and transitioning to becoming a more digitally mature platform. The Digital Europe Programme’s cross-border data exchange building block, eDelivery, was identified as a potential integration solution to improve SilverHub’s platform maturity level. This study is an initial qualitative investigation of the interoperability dynamics and requirements for the SilverHub ecosystem to integrate with eDelivery. Document analysis and several workshops with SilverHub stakeholders were conducted. Based on these results, an eDelivery organizational-specific model was deemed most appropriate for the SilverHub ecosystem, along with a dynamic discovery model for cross-border data exchange. Future work includes a feasibility analysis of eDelivery integration and simulating eDelivery data exchange between SilverHub and its organizational members.