Currently, many people are looking for a good definition of "Living Lab"......in the context of systemic innovation as it has been described by Bror Salmelin, head of unit, New Working Environments unit at the European Commission.
One may search on Google and will get back 111.000 "living lab" references with a huge spectrum of different definitions....like species program, environmental testbed, usability testbed, applied research....and so on.
A good way of reducing this huge amount of references is to add "innovation" to "living lab" and there we get only 24.000 references whose first in line are a link to a presentation of CORELABS, by Mikael Borjeson, mentioning living lab as a "co-creation environment for human-centric research and innovation".
The CORELAB IST project is a "coordination action towards a European Network of Living Labs as a sustainable open co-creation environment to improve citizens and workers in research and innovation of new services, products and systems" and "a more efficient innovative system as an open co-creation in natural daily life/work environment together with engaged citizens/users, closing the gap between needs/ideas and business/user valid solutions"
Here is the link to this presentation:
europa.eu.int/.../activities/atwork/collaboration_at_work/ events/2006_02_07_cwe_launch/cwe/docs/corelabs.ppt
and a second link to another interesting and very instructive presentation, by Veli-Pekka Niitamo, mentioning living lab as "Originates from the MIT, Boston, Prof William Mitchell, MediaLab and School of Architecture and city planning. ‘Living Labs as a research methodology for sensing, prototyping, validating and refining complex solutions in multiple and evolving real life contexts.’In Europe it has been mentioned in four different contexts:
1. Bringing laboratory based technology test-beds into real-life user focused environments for validation.(IST SO Research Test-beds…Creation)
2. Developing mobility services for citizens in a real-life early adapter or normal population communities with existing and close to market technologies. Focus in an user centric co-design/co-creation process and Public Private Partnerships.(IST SO e-Government..ref.Intelcities)
3. Virtualizing LivingLab as a context sensitive research and development methodology for multi-site and multi-stakeholder environment to study new working environments from Pan-European perspectives (IST SO New Working environment,,BrainBridge,AMI@Work Communities, LivingLab SIG)
4. National Initiatives in Finland and Sweden. Dimes as an industry initiative in 4 biggest finnish cities to validate new mobility services in a real user centric models. LivingLab Finland Research Community collaborating with public funded projects with Dimes"
Here is the link:
www.sric-bi.com/LoD/meetings/2005-06-08/VPNiitamo.ppt
Then there is a document about the Madeira living lab, a paper from Alvaro Oliveira:
Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'06) Track 4 p. 83a
From a Successful Regional Information Society Strategy to an Advanced Living Lab in Mobile Technologies and Services
Here is the abstract of this paper:
"This paper describes the methodology, tools, action plans and results used in Madeira Island, a peripheral region in the Atlantic, in order to define, create and implement successful knowledge and innovation culture society strategies to drive a sustainable economic development policy. Lessons will be extracted from hands on experience on how to build effective Innovation culture and information society strategies in a peripheral region and how to ensure its implementation and sustainability. These regional projects aim at improving government, business and citizens practices, processes and social behaviour, through an adequate use of selected actions translated in projects with the involvement of all the stakeholders. Madeira which are driving major changes in the work environment and the business processes themselves. We argue in this paper that the current dynamic Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and organisational testing environment in Madeira can provide the ideal conditions for an European Living Lab targeted to new collaborative and mobile work processes, services and business models as being currently pursued by Madeira Tecnopolo."
associated link:
doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/HICSS.2006.189
Last but not least, the following document about "living lab" explaination/history is from Richard Ennals
www.kingston.ac.uk/~ku07009/LivingLabs/ PapersAndSlides/Day1RichardEnnals.pdf
A Google search with "innovation living lab" give back a single reference (1999, in French in the text)
"Dans une manœuvre qui va ouvrir des portes au reste du monde, NBTel Global Inc. a uni ses forces à celles de British Telecom (BT) pour partager de saines pratiques de gestion et des connaissances dans le domaine des services gouvernementaux en ligne de part et d'autre de l'Atlantique.
Cette nouvelle relation commerciale est un véritable modèle de l'environnement d'innovation Living LAB™ de NBTel Global, dans lequel un produit est élaboré et mis au point d'abord au Nouveau-Brunswick, puis exporté sur les marchés mondiaux."
At least, it means that there is a trademark on "Living Lab" which has been granted to the NBTel Global company in 1999 in the Canada and it looks like in this context as a concept of localisation services to access other regional markets.
All of that is very instructive and this is a few of what you can get on the web about "living lab".....
Another possibility is to take a look at the "Experience and Application Research" (EAR) as defined by the ISTAG
Working Group on Experience and Application Research:
"Experience and Application Research has been proposed as a means of addressing the challenge of creating a human-centred approach to R&D in ambient intelligence. Experience and Application Research involves research, development and design by, with and for users. It also covers research into methods and tools to enable this. A novel aspect of Experience and Application Research is that it involves users in all stages of R&D and all stages of the product development lifecycle, not just at the end phases as, for example, in more classical field trials or user testing of products."
See the ISTAG working group report "Involving users in the development of Ambient Intelligence" on http://www.cordis.lu/ist/istag.htm
In a preliminary conclusion, one could argue that a "living lab" is neither a traditional research lab nor a testbed (functionality and usability tests) but rather an "innovation platform" that brings together and involve, or in stronger word, engage all stakeholders such as end-users, researchers, industrialists, policy makers, and so on at the earlier stage of the innovation process in order to experiment breakthrough concepts and potential value for both the society (citizens) and users that will lead to breakthrough innovations. At least this is what I would personaly answer to the nowadays famous question: what is a living lab?
For sure, it is quite obvious to mention that citizens and end-users are not considered as "rats" or any other kind of animals observed in a laboratory to validate the usability and acceptability aspects but as key contributors to the ideas generation and engaged into the innovation process as key players.
A pretty nice metaphoric representation is to compare a "living lab" or "innovation platform" with a "garden of ideas". Gardeners are all the above mentioned living lab stakeholders that are making sure any good idea has a chance of growing fast enough through complementary contributions to potentially prove its value for both the society (citizens) and end-users.
Personaly, I foresee a strong link with on-line communities as a living lab could be both a physical arena and a virtual arena where collaboration/interaction among the stakeholders takes place to "cultivate" (enrich) ideas. On-line communities have the strengh of bringing the necessary diversity from which emerge breakthrough ideas and related innovations like it is experimented within the AMI@Work communities, launched in June 2005 by the New Working Environments unit at the European Commission, where there is a good combination of technology push and application pull. In this context, there is also a strong potential relationship with Reed's law about "Group Forming Networks" and its exponential growth that could be turned into "Ideas-group or Concepts-group Forming Networks (CFN)".
This is the approach (CFN) we are currently trying to demonstrate at EsoCE-Net with the technological support of Fraunhofer-FIT that will be implemented into our common eProfessionals collaborative web environment.
