Empowered by neutral research institutes, the Virtual Watch Tower (VWT) project adopts a community-driven approach engaging a diverse set of partners to co-create a VWT prototype and prepare for global adoptions with an ever-growing community. 

Collaboration and data sharing remain major challenges in the supply chain and logistics industry, despite enormous progress in technological development. The VWT initiative takes a novel angle to address these two shortcomings. The vision is to create an ever-growing global community that co-creates a digital solution / VWTnet for enhanced visibility and improved supply chain risk management through private and public data-driven analytics and collaboration across supply chain networks worldwide. VWT combines collaborative software development for data sharing with community building for collaboration co-creating the solution. It is co-evolution that leads to transparency, which, alongside neutrality, brings trust as the basis for data sharing and collaboration. The goal is to establish a neutral entity backed by trustworthy and impartial actors to ensure continuity of the effort and solution for improved supply chain management.

The ‘legal entity’ needs to act as a fiduciary for its community members; this means managing the asset for the benefit of others. VWT is poised to do that as a non-profit entity. As the ecosystem orchestrator, VWT coordinates data collection and data use, where the community members can influence the orchestration rules. VWT, in its role as a fiduciary, ensures that data usage follows those rules, making it difficult to centralise control for any specific actor.

In order to define a type of entity that can carry and further the VWT while fulfilling the needs of all parties, A*STAR's IHPC, together with Sweden's RISE and Finland’s VTT, has signed an MOU to collaboratively investigate the prerequisites for an independent and neutral entity to carry and further the Virtual Watch Tower (VWT), a cargo owner driven, terminal centric initiative, and digital solution to tackle challenging issues in international shipping and supply chains.