Best practices Database for Living Labs - ALCOTRA - Innovation

3.4 The Technological Platform Model
The “process oriented” definitions above leave the additional issue open of introducing and describing a
“Living Lab platform”, whereby knowledge is shared and the collective work, including social intelligence, of
multidisciplinary teams and user communities is crystallized into new and emerging concepts, artefacts and
ultimately services.
Marc Pallot [26] gives emphasis to Living Labs as technological platforms (see next Figure) offering research
and innovation services for the design, exploration, experimentation and evaluation of new and innovative
ideas, usage scenarios, and application prototypes. Within a Living Lab, an iterative process takes place -
whatever innovation is to be generated - that links together the following four activities:
1. Co-creation of new ideas, concepts, artefacts and application scenarios, by means of open sessions
of collective creativity involving all concerned stakeholders and especially end users;
2. Exploration of alternative usage scenarios through setting the scene by the implementation of
different immersive techniques within real-life environments;
3. Experimentation done on various assessment scenarios for concrete applications and/or service
prototypes by the use of the Living Lab’s technological platform, also within real-life environments;
4. Evaluation of the resulting exploitation scenarios on the basis of metrics for measuring the Quality
of Service as well as the Quality of Experience, which both allow anticipating the potential degree
of future adoption by the user communities involved.
Figure 9: Living Labs as Technology Platforms (from: [26])
The FP7 ICT STREP ELLIOT (Experiential Living Labs for the Internet Of Things, http://www.elliot-project.eu)
adopted this model to develop IoT technologies and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) services by and for the
users, supported by a KSB (Knowledge-Social-Business) Experience Model [27] and by an innovative ICT
Platform operating as a knowledge and experience gathering environment. This combination of user driven
experimentation and experiential design approaches is expected to positively impact on the development
and adoption of IoT technologies and services.
The project is co-funded by the ERDF
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