Best practices Database for Living Labs - ALCOTRA - Innovation

(from a public authority’s viewpoint) local innovation policies and strategies. An evaluative ‘feedback loop’
from this third layer to the PPP on the top is key to ensure not only the eventual replication of the trial at
the same or another future stage, but also a collective, shared and transparent evaluation of the results
obtained. This is another essential feature of the Living Labs approach, well in line with the principles of
Open Innovation, but also a guarantee for taxpayer’s money expenditure, provided that most stakeholders
do belong to the public sector.
The relevance of the strategic layer is confirmed by the evidence collected in 2008 within the ‘1 st and 2 nd
wave’ members of the European Network of Living Labs [13], which showed how in 8 out of 10 cases, their
essence (or raison d’être) pointed at the creation of innovative places (milieux) for territorial marketing and
business (or SME) promotion, thus adding to the plethora of territorial innovation policy instruments. This
evidence can only be partly explained by a prevalence of government stakeholders (in 35% of the cases,
according to the 2008 survey) within the Living Labs PPPP’s. More generally, it stems from the shared
intuition that by leveraging on the positive externalities of user-driven, open innovation, a bigger share of
product and service inventions can actually reach the market, which in turn leads to the creation of a more
favourable and conducive environment to entrepreneurship and business development, not to speak of
employment and social cohesion.
In this context, it comes with little surprise that the majority of the Living Labs’ thematic domains surveyed
in 2008 was belonging to Government and Public Administration on the one hand, and to SME-specific
industrial applications on the other hand (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Overview of Living Labs domains - 2008 (from: [13])
In the above respect, the Living Lab approach presents itself as a new model of territorial innovation in
which the local institutional dynamics play a significant role [14]. This is achieved via a novel and reportedly
successful ‘mixture’ of ICT-based collaboration, open innovation, people (user) integration in the design
process [15] and public private partnerships, as the following table shows in more detail:
The project is co-funded by the ERDF
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