Facilitating adoption of international information infrastructures: A living labs approach

Abstract

One of the key challenges that governments face in supervising international supply chains is the need for improving the quality of data accompanying the logistics flow. In many supply chains, individual parties in the chain work with low quality data for their operations and compliance, even though somewhere in the supply chain, better data is available. In the European CASSANDRA project, ICT-supported information infrastructures are developed to exchange data between businesses and government, to support visibility on the supply chain and the re-use of information. However, to gain better data, actors need to be open about their operations, processes and systems to parties that are geographically and culturally on the other side of the world. This adds (perceived) vulnerabilities for parties already operating in a highly competitive environment. This could be a major barrier for making the innovation work. We argue that Living Labs, as a collaborative innovation approach, are able to support the adoption of innovative information infrastructures. They help identifying gains that innovations may bring. Furthermore, the trust-based setting also mitigates the added (perceived) vulnerability such innovations bring for the participants. We illustrate this by examples from the CASSANDRA Living Labs. © 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.