Best practices Database for Living Labs - ALCOTRA - Innovation

• People (User) Integration in Design: the novelty of the Living Labs approach lies in the particular
emphasis given to people’s involvement in the design process since the very early stages of the
product/service development chain [11, 15]. This is something that goes beyond the traditional UCD
principles, as they are typically anchored to the latest stages of testing, verification and validation;
• Public Private Partnership: this is the most typical nature of European Living Labs – whenever they are
established as such – and in that respect, it acquires a similar trait to the ‘support space’ of Innovative
Milieux [21], or the territorial ‘Triple Helix’ required by the EC-funded Research Driven Clusters.
As Almirall and Wareham [12] point out, Living Labs engage in a sort of intermediary role between
individual users and the other local innovation stakeholders. In particular, they “organize users in needs
finding exercises contributing to ideation, support them in acting as entrepreneurs, orchestrate the
innovation process, organize user contribution in incremental innovation through localization exercises or
promote societal involvement for a certain platform, product or service. Therefore, playing a more
encompassing and systemic role in the innovation process” that structures and provides governance to user
participation in Open Innovation.
While larger enterprises seem to have sufficient resources to avail themselves of a similar kind of
infrastructure, a totally different story concerns SMEs – the natural market of election for the Living Lab’s
‘services’. The diagram below depicts the distribution of a representative sample of “1 st and 2 nd wave”
ENoLL members across a wide range of SME support services. Access to R&D communities, unsurprisingly,
stands out as being the main service offered by nearly all Living Labs. Other important contributions
emerging from the graph have to do with the role of Living Labs as technology platforms or data sources,
possibly relevant to the purposes of product/service development and/or improvement thereof.
Figure 3: Overview of Living Labs services - 2008 (from: [13])
The project is co-funded by the ERDF
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