Roles For and Impact Creation of Sustainability-Oriented Innovations in A Shared Semiconductor Infrastructure

A shared semiconductor infrastructure can be studied as a provider-driven living lab. The infrastructure hosts several actors, who undertake different activities in the infrastructure and play different roles. The shared infrastructure provider plays several active roles for sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI) in the living lab. The user companies take either an active or a passive role for SOI. In addition, based on their personal interests, the user-company employees take their own roles for advancing SOI in the shared infrastructure. In any case, a strong orchestrator is needed for true co-innovation activities among the actors of the living lab. Based on the actors, resources and roles, and activities, we analyse the impact of SOI activities on a regional, national and global scale. We analyse the impact of SOI activities in the semiconductor living lab and conclude that the impact can be categorised on different geographical levels, both related to the development of the digital society, research activities, industry development as well as society in general. SOI activities have the biggest impact when integrated into research activities, industrial offering and diffused to the global semiconductor industry while sustainably advancing the development of our digital society. Next-generation semiconductor devices themselves are SOIs and affect eight of the United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs).