Living Labs

The creation of today’s complex systems of products, services, and processes requires a merge of knowledge from diverse national, disciplinary, and personal skill-based perspectives. The increasingly distributed knowledge necessary for innovation requires new strategies for knowledge-sharing and knowledge-creation (Holst 2007). Innovation is seldom an individual responsibility, hence creativity within groups needs to be facilitated and supported, innovation processes should be interactive, and the importance of networks and networking to support the innovation process should be emphasised.

A Living Lab is a gathering of public, private partnerships in which businesses, authorities and citizens work together with the creation, validation, and test of new services, business ideas, markets and technologies in real-life-contexts. The purpose of a Living Lab is to create a shared arena in which digital services, processes, and new ways of working can be developed and tested with user representatives in a real world context. Hence, a Living Lab is an environment in which people and technology are gathered and in which the every day context stimulates and challenges both research and development since authorities and citizens take active part in the innovation process. Another way of defining a Living Lab is to view it as a research methodology for judging, validating and testing prototypes as well as to improve complex solutions in a multifaceted emerging real context.

The basic idea of Living Labs is to gain access to the ideas, experiences, and knowledge that users possess, based on their daily needs of support from products, services, or applications. The user-centric approach in Living Labs consist of human beings, citizens and the civic society as a source of innovative ideas (CoreLabs 2006). Living Lab is built on co-operation with users to support creativity and this call for an efficient interaction with a large population of people. There are two aspects important to consider when interacting with a larger population, the ability to capture the ideas and input from a larger population and the ability to evaluate and understand technology-use in a specific context.

Since Living Labs is a rather new research area and phenomena, the amount of supporting theories for understanding the concept is limited. This has lead to some confusion related to concept definitions. In this section, our perspective on the concept based on accessible literature is presented. The definition of the concept testbed is, according to Ballon et al., (2005), “a standardized laboratory environment used for testing new technologies, products and services and protected from the hazards of testing in a live or production environment” (p2). This definition implies that the environment, in which the tests are performed, is a closed and controlled environment. Ballon et al. (2005), continue by giving a definition of Living Labs as follows: “An experimentation environment in which technology is given shape in real life contexts and in which (end) users are considered ‘co-producers’.” (p3). These definitions show that Living Labs are somewhat different from testbeds. In a Living Lab, the technology is tested in a real life context and end-users are important informants in the tests. In testbeds, users are not necessarily involved and the laboratory setting is controlled. Hence, the Living Labs aims at reaching a broader market than testbeds do.

The Living Lab concept refers to methodologies where innovations, such as, services, products, or application enhancements are created and evaluated with a human-centric approach in real-world environments. The aim is to involve a mix of user representatives in the development stages of products and prototypes, before the innovations are launched on the real market. In Living Labs, activities go on around the clock: this means that users get the opportunity to gain an understanding of a new product or service in their everyday life (Eriksson, Niitamo, and Kulkki 2005; CoreLabs 2006). Therefore, Living Labs can be seen as an instrument to sustain an efficient and dynamic innovation process where the Living Lab provides an environment for companies to test their innovations in different development stages. In addition, it is an environment allowing potential users to influence the final design of products through close cooperation with the company (CoreLabs 2006; CoreLabs 2006). The core of Living Labs is the involvement of users throughout innovation processes; thereby, the innovation system becomes human-centric, in contrast to technology-centric.