Socio-Technical Systems on the Move

Abstract

Because of the advancements in Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), and notably the increased spreading of Web 2.0 Internet-based services and mobile computing, an increasingly information-rich environment is made available, where new types of Socio-Technical Systems (STS) can be established. Due to the pervasiveness of ICT, designing and developing Socio-Technical Systems is raising an increasing interest also from a policy point of view. They play a crucial role in the improvement of the so-called soft-infrastructures, a main asset for delivering social innovation. Raising the performance of such an infrastructure, in fact, turns out to be a major challenge to be addressed in order to meet EU requirements for smart growth. In this chapter, a concept of STS is suggested, and its ICT-enabled implications for policy activity are highlighted. As an example, the concept is used for designing a collaborative platform for health knowledge exchange at a regional level.