RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

Living Labs (LILA): A community driven approach to technology transfer… 311
tems are considered through a living lab approach along with resolving the technology adoption
sources of resistance and potential barriers.
Birmingham City University (BCU) Campus: Living Lab
as innovation catalyst
The formation of living labs as an innovation catalyst is important requiring an understanding
and recognition of the systematic character of innovation, which involves stages of
adapting the collaborative network, tools, methods and processes for the product development
(Correa, 2007; Lewis, 2013). The organisational inertia is overcome by community building-based
transition arenas reflecting living labs acting as open-innovation cycle. The
stakeholders have access to user-driven innovations, product trials and competencies through
the comprehensive platforms of living labs. The focus of living labs is quite dynamic entailing,
user-acceptance, integrating to prevailing systems, investing in services and infrastructure
to producing mature technologies; but pilot outcomes are intangible and less predictable.
University campuses are the best way of forming the open real living labs for innovating
new technologies. For this purpose, various students, researchers, engineers and lecturers
brought an idea to design and prototype a cane “XploR” for the blind and visually impaired.
The idea had many potential features (e.g.; facial recognition, GPS navigation and obstacle
detection from the 10-meter distance, and 5 different pulses of haptic touch) to be integrated
within one cane. Birmingham City University (BCU) used its living lab, where end-users,
researchers, developers and lecturers all collaborate to evaluate and progress the development
of the project. As part of the Interreg NWE Living Lab Application (LILA) project, the team
had various discussions and trials with a diverse range of users and conflicting demands on
internationalisation of entrepreneurship when discussed with France and Luxemburg. Birmingham
City University living lab partners in Luxembourg mentioned that their users did not
find the facial recognition feature particularly useful for them but they emphasised the importance
of scanning the obstacle from 10 metres. Whereas when working alongside the France
living lab, they emphasised facial recognition features more rather than the Global Positioning
Support (GPS) navigation that was the preferred function emphasised by England users.
During the life cycle of this project, it was realised that there should have been a discussion
on this project with all the partners, stakeholders and end user’s experience, in order to form
the basis of internationalising the entrepreneurship. The development of “the project through
the living labs supports business model innovation, user-behaviour transformation and crowdsourcing.
The simulating business models are created through living labs environments penetrating
in real-life and low-risk markets. The “XploR” cane project also identified the need
for defining the roles and relationships between all the stakeholders yielding a more competence
development eliminating the cultural barriers as well smoothing the internationalisation
of entrepreneurship process. The development of XploR in the BCU campus (Living Lab)
is amplified as catalyst and has broadened industrial and societal transformations.