Welcome to the Living Lab Wiki

From Living Lab

Welcome

The purpose of this Wiki is to describe existing Living Labs and the measurement software that is used in these Living Labs. It also documents measurement infrastructures that could be used in a Living Lab environment. The information contained in this Wiki is developed in e.g. the Amsterdam Living Lab project.

We plan to add more content in the first half of 2009.

This wiki also hosts the website of the following event, which is co-organized by members of the Amsterdam Living Lab project:

MLL09: Mobile Living Labs, Methods and Tools for Evaluation in the Wild A one-day workshop at MobileHCI09, September 15, 2009, Bonn, Germany.

What is a Living Lab?

To make things complicated, there are several definitions of Living Labs.

Living Labs are...

• open innovation environments in real-life settings, in which user-driven innovation is fully integrated within the co-creation process of new services, products and societal infrastructures (EC-ISM, 2009).
• about experimentation and co-creation with real users in real life environments, where users together with researchers, firms and public institutions look for new solutions, new products, new services or new business models (Open Living Labs, 2009).
• collaborations of public-private-civic partnerships in which stakeholders co-create new products, services, businesses and technologies in real life environments and virtual networks in multi-contextual spheres (Feurstein et al., 2008).
• a research and development methodology whereby innovations, such as services, products, and application enhancements, are created and validated in collaborative, multi-contextual empirical real-world settings (Eriksson et al., 2005).
• an experimentation environment in which technology is given shape in real life contexts and in which (end) users are considered ‘co-producers’ (Ballon et al., 2005).
• a system enabling people, users/consumers of services and product, to take active roles as contributors and cocreators in the research, development, and innovation process (CoreLabs, 2007).

Ståhlbröst (2008) concludes: The starting point for any Living Lab is to, in close cooperation among involved stakeholders, develop product and services from the basis of what users really want and need, where the main role of the Living Lab is to engage and empower users to participate in the creation of valuable and viable assets. The interaction with users should be carried out in real-world contexts with active users aiming for innovation in close correlation with ongoing research and development processes.

Vocabulary

LivingLab projects tend to use a wide variety of terms to discuss the Living Lab ecosystem. In order to clarify what we mean with the various terms and concepts, we have set up a Vocabulary.