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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.

This paper discusses challenges and obstacles of the Estonian customs authority while implementing the new EU VAT directive aiming to raise efficiency in the VAT declaration life-cycle. The general goal of the directive is to reduce cross-border fraud, gain revenue and modernize the system for governments and businesses. Due to the fact that the impact of the new VAT directive is tremendous, it also changes radically AS-IS work routines of customs authorities. The current paper presents the Estonian experience regarding the implementation of the new work procedures through providing data of the new technology developments and bringing out main concerns in terms of ongoing development activities. Transforming old ICT systems to newer platforms with regards to the new directive also changes current work procedures, which means that adjustments in the organization are also required. The central reason to move towards automatization is the dramatically increasing volumes of shipments requiring customs clearance. However, it is a complex process to achieve this task because of different or nonagreed data sets shared in the existing systems by various stakeholders as well as low quality of data. Consequently, the results of the paper are aimed to aid implementing the changes in various other customs authorities in the EU.