Best practices Database for Living Labs - ALCOTRA - Innovation

10. ENoLL evaluation criteria
In the Database only Living Lab data is stored from Living Labs which have been approved to join the ENoLL
Living Lab Network. The approval process is conducted almost every year, meaning that there is a formal
evaluation of Living Lab applications for the ENoLL Network. This Evaluation is done by Living Lab experts
from all around Europe, Francesco Molinari and Jens Schumacher have also been acting as reviewer as well
as Lead-reviewer for this process. The goal of this Living Lab approval process is to ensure that Living Labs
can enter the EnoLL which are compliant according to the general concept of Living Labs. Thus the
application does usually not provide a ranking but instead checks whether certain threshold values have
been reached. As such all Living Labs can be considered to some extend Best practices since there is a
reasonable high drop-out quote in the evaluation process. However the evaluation is only done on the
bases of the documentation provided by the Living Labs to the Review team and there are some restrictions
regarding the application form, thus the evaluation is mainly a kind of “desk evaluation” meaning that the
actual situation at the place where the Living Lab resides is not taken into account.
11. Usage of the Database
As explained in the chapter about the ownership of the data the usage of the database and its content is
currently restricted. In general the usage is only possible for researchers at FHV who would like to conduct
e.g. statistical research on Living Labs. As such no GUI was developed to support the usage of the database
but native SQL-commands (standard query language) can be used to search through the DB. The main
usage of the database so far has been to identify similar thematic Living Labs in order to support other
Living labs e.g. in the set-up of their activities, finding a good governance structure, identify methods for
user/citizen integration in Living Labs.
The Database was used early on in the Alcotra project to identify a first set of Living Labs that are situated
in a similar thematic context as defined by Alcotra in the in the workshops in Marseille and Genoa (see the
following figure).
The project is co-funded by the ERDF
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