Best practices Database for Living Labs - ALCOTRA - Innovation

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of this real-life experimentation, the company developing the advanced mobile service will gain important feedback from potential customers about performance, quality, efficiency, thus being able to improve the service and to approach the market with a higher probability of success. 3.5.3 Innovation processes Another difference between the Living Lab and other development approaches is their focus on the vertical value chain in which customers, producers, and suppliers are involved, with the objective to create new businesses: in fact, the Living Lab approach does not only aim at involving end users in the development processes, because it also strives to facilitate the interaction between other relevant stakeholders, such as research organizations, companies, public sector, and society as a whole. Thus, from a process perspective, Living Labs are innovative because they encompass two ground-breaking ideas: (a) Managing a multi-organizational, inter-disciplinary collaboration for innovation (pilot configuration challenge), and (b) Engaging intensively with end users (methodological and instrumental challenge). In order to be met, both challenges require specific research methods and tools, respectively to (a) Trigger innovators and support the formation of effective innovation groups, and (b) Engage users adequately on the innovation process. Several methods, such as action research, community informatics, contextual design, user-centred design, participatory design, empathic design, emotional design, and others, already exist in research and practice, but they mostly fail to sufficiently empower users for co-creation in open development environments. 3.5.4 User engagement Research up to now conducted on the subject of users role in innovation processes has found that needs are highly heterogeneous and that users show a high willingness to pay for a solution that is more closely related to there individual needs: the advantage of a user driven innovation process is that users can develop exactly what they want. Users can have intrinsic motivations to co-create (interest in innovation and improvement, fun to participate, etc.), but could also require extrinsic motivations (e.g. financial or material incentives for consumers, free loan of the new IT system, etc.), which have to be taken into account. The focus on user engagement derives from this central and driving role attributed to users as a source of dynamism (“user driven”), creativity and improvement inputs (“co-creation”). As the following picture shows, end users potentially play a role in all phases of the innovation lifecycle, from idea to concept to product/service development, from deployment for testing and experimentation purposes, evaluation and ultimately market launch. End users are central contributors to Living Labs because they are expected to be a source of ideas (creative role for the generation of radically new concepts), a mechanism for product improvement (supporting role in an iterative development process), verification and validation (evaluation role), as well as diffusion agents (marketing role). The project is co-funded by the ERDF Page 22 of 78
Figure 11: The Living Lab Innovation ‘Vortex’ (from: [3]) User engagement can be differentiated in terms of intensity, between • Reactive modes, for example giving feedback on an existing proposal, prototype or product, and • Proactive modes, for example becoming a source of innovation or ideas to improving a product or service along its development process. In theory, the benefits of user involvement in the development of new products, services and processes are quite relevant: expected added values are for example higher acceptance among stakeholders, better hitrates and faster time-to market. Involving users in the development of interactive systems and innovative solutions typically increases the likelihood that those new products and/or services will be useful and usable: empirical evidence suggests that user involvement is beneficial in such developments [31]. Let us take an example from IT industry: nowadays, IT investments are considered failures if they do not produce an added value for the users. Actually, in order to increase the probability that users will use a public IT system when it is introduced in the competitive and open market, this must offer users an added value of some sort. Therefore, it is important to gain knowledge about what the intended users need and want from technology. One obvious way to gain knowledge about users and their needs is to engage them on the development and testing process run by the IT firms themselves. In market research, experts usually investigate end user needs. User engagement goes one step further. It is not purely about assessing and considering user needs in the product/service development process, but also about actively involving end users. Therefore, suggestions, remarks and recommendations from them need to be taken seriously: this represents an innovative business model, which asks product developers and researchers to accept the user as benchmark for the design of a new product or service. The strategy of this new business model, strongly linked to people, is to cooperate in a productive and effective manner in order to jointly develop appropriate products in a bottom-up fashion: according to this perspective, social innovation is recognized as a crucial source of innovativeness in Living Labs. 3.5.5 Innovation outcomes The single most consensual feature of Living Labs is their overarching purpose, as captured in part (5) of the ENoLL’s definition. Living Labs are strongly expected to be platforms fostering business innovation in a way that bridges the crucial gap between market pull, commercially oriented product/service development and research push, technology driven solution proposal and product/service prototyping (see next picture). The project is co-funded by the ERDF Page 23 of 78
Page 1 and 2: Alcotra Innovation project Delivera
Page 3 and 4: Preface For the study and creation
Page 5 and 6: TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 7
Page 7 and 8: 1. Introduction Much has been writt
Page 9 and 10: 2. Living Labs as Territorial Innov
Page 11 and 12: (from a public authority’s viewpo
Page 13 and 14: • People (User) Integration in De
Page 15 and 16: 3.1 The FormIT Process The FormIT p
Page 17 and 18: Figure 7: Sample Living Lab’s tri
Page 19 and 20: 3.4 The Technological Platform Mode
Page 21: Figure 10: Living Labs as Functiona
Page 25 and 26: • Openness: the innovation proces
Page 27 and 28: Figure 14: Geographical distributio
Page 29 and 30: scanned for the identification of t
Page 31 and 32: Turning now our attention to the e-
Page 33 and 34: Figure 23: Relative performance of
Page 35 and 36: Figure 24: Key Profiles of Living L
Page 37 and 38: Figure 25: Key Profiles of Living L
Page 39 and 40: 6. References [1] Molinari, F. 2011
Page 41 and 42: Annex A: Full Database of ENoLL Mem
Page 43 and 44: France OFF-ROAD MEMORY Living Lab w
Page 45 and 46: Slovenia LENS Living Lab www.einova
Page 47 and 48: The project is co-funded by the ERD
Page 61 and 62: TABLE OF CONTENTS 7. INTRODUCTION 6
Page 63 and 64: 8. Ownership of existing Living Lab
Page 65 and 66: 10. ENoLL evaluation criteria In th
Page 67 and 68: 12. Extension of existing database
Page 69 and 70: 13.4 Organisation and Governance Th
Page 71 and 72: Figure 28: spider-web diagram The t
Page 73 and 74:
SME Innovation Support Figure 35: S
Page 75 and 76:
As it can be seen the new database
Page 77 and 78:
In order to search for specific rec
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