Best practices Database for Living Labs - ALCOTRA - Innovation

2. Living Labs as Territorial Innovation Models
In line with some authoritative statements [2, 3], we can define Living Labs as territorial policy instruments
where all the key stakeholders of R&D and innovation governance – namely firms, public authorities,
universities and citizens – collectively form a Public-Private-People-Partnership (PPPP) for the joint support
and management of systemic innovation according to an open, user driven perspective. In particular, the
PPPP members agree to collaborate in the co-creation, design, prototyping, validation and testing of new
services, products and technologies, experimented by and with the end users in real-life contexts, thus
achieving the preconditions for “democratizing the process of innovation” [4], at least at local and
community level. There, the human being is seen as a source of improvement and sustainable change, not
just like a consumer, a customer, or a ‘guinea pig’ for closed-door, classical prototype validation and
verification activities. To adopt these principles in practice, several real-life experimentation pilots are set
up and executed, which are normally and quite simply dubbed Living Lab’s trials.
It is quite interesting to note that most initiators of the Living Labs ‘movement’ in Europe actually operated
in urban [5] and mobile [6] environments, either to increase the participation of citizens in spatial planning
decision making or to implement User Centred Design (UCD) techniques into R&D on ubiquitous computing
technologies. Although the ‘Mobile City’ – and more recently ‘Smart City’ – concept can be seen as quite
transversal to many experiences, it is in regional development policy design that the extended stakeholders
engagement within a Living Lab’s PPPP can really mark a visible difference with respect to the UCD and
Participatory Decision-Making (PDM) approaches. In fact, the main impact of Living Labs is to increase the
economic and social attractiveness of the territory they belong to, especially by improving the conditions of
ICT-enabled systemic innovation [7].
This, however, requires the unification and coordination of several independent efforts from the local
stakeholders, while bringing about a great deal of advantages. In particular, the involvement of citizens and
businesses helps to strengthen a culture of innovation and to raise the awareness of policy makers towards
the socioeconomic value of infrastructure investments (such as broadband); the cultural commitment to
the so-called ‘Living Labbing’ leads to a permanent improvement of innovation capacity in both mature and
emerging markets. At the end of the day, this calls for an integrated, cross-sectorial, and also possibly crossdomain
approach to the governance of innovation, growth and development in a given area, which can
hardly be achieved without electronic means [8].
Typically, the ‘birth announcement’ of a Living Lab coincides with pilot users, researchers, policy makers
and businesses at local level entering into agreements, on the basis of which they engage in a long-term
collaboration and commit to practicing user driven, open innovation [9]. Thus, we may assimilate a Living
Lab to a multi-stakeholder platform, though it can also happen that the original PPPP gets structured into a
conventional legal form.
A widely accepted definition [10] describes a multi-stakeholder platform as a (voluntary or statutory) body,
comprising different stakeholders, who perceive the same problem, realize their own respective
interdependencies, and come together to agree on the best action strategies for solving it. It is like a
roundtable, where people are gathered with very different perspectives. Examples of such a platform do
abound in several, rather independent policy contexts – from Millennium Development to natural resource
management and environmental assessment, from participatory urban planning to the deployment of
Information Society. Some platforms are promoted and supported by public decision-makers; some others
just aggregate and develop spontaneously.
When people come together in such platforms, they hold multi-stakeholder dialogues, which instantiate
themselves into one or more collaboration experiments (trials). Basically, the multi-stakeholder dialogue is
not just a conversation model, but an interactive approach to get things done - a contrived situation in
which a set of (more or less) interdependent stakeholders are identified and invited to meet and interact to
The project is co-funded by the ERDF
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