Best practices Database for Living Labs - ALCOTRA - Innovation

12. Extension of existing database
As the Living Lab movement and the Living Labs in it are maturing there is an increased need to replicate
the success of some of the Living Labs in different parts in Europe. Thus the need for the definition of real
best practices started to grow especially towards the end of the CO-LLabs project (ca. 1 year ago). In order
to allow for the identification of Best practices in Europe an Indicator Framework had to be defined.
However the topic of Living Labs is quite diverse and it is difficult to find Indicators that can be deployed as
best practice indicators regardless of e.g. the thematic issues dealt with inside a Living Lab. At the same
time one of the biggest problems in the Living Lab area is still that no description of a methodology or
method exists which will helps to deploy a Living Lab from scratch, currently the Living Lab activities are
mainly steered by case studies with limited transferability. In order to deal with this problem the Living Lab
cube was developed by the partners in the CO-LLabs project, which identifies the different dimensions of a
living lab and describes how to deploy them.
13. Best practices criteria
As part of the Corelabs project a framework was developed to assess the performance of Living Labs
according to the relevant dimensions and characteristics of living labs. Seven categories for analysis and
evaluation of the Living Labs were identified. These categories are derived from the “interoperability cube”
developed within the CORELABS CA (EP# 035065) .
“The harmonization cube not only represents the most important elements of a Living Lab, but also enables
specifying bridges between existing Living Labs, i.e., to learn from each other, benchmark the validation of
user behavior studies, exchange best practices, and interconnect the Living Labs. Next to facilitating a
common ground for sharing, the cube model enables recognizing the degree of harmonization of used
methods and tools in Living Labs.” [4]
Later on an additional indicator was added to identify the contribution of living labs to SME-Innovation.
The categories are described below.
Figure 27: Seven Categories
The project is co-funded by the ERDF
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