A Living Lab is a research concept. A living lab is a user-centred, open-innovation ecosystem, operating in a territorial context, integrating concurrent research and innovation processes within a public-private-people partnership.
The concept is based on a systematic user co-creation approach, integrating research and innovation processes. These are integrated through the Co-Creation, Exploration, Experimentation and Evaluation of innovative ideas, scenarios, concepts and related technological artefacts in real life use cases. Such use cases involve user communities, not only as observed subjects but also as a source of creation.
This approach allows all involved stakeholders to concurrently consider both the global performance of a product or service and its potential adoption by users.
How it works?
The living lab process, which integrates both user-centred research and open innovation, is based on a maturity spiral concurrently involving a multidisciplinary team in the following four main activities:
Co-creation: bring together technology push and application pull (i.e. crowdsourcing, crowd casting) into a diversity of views, constraints and knowledge sharing, that sustains the ideation of new scenarios, concepts and related artefacts.
Exploration: engage all stakeholders, especially user communities, at the earlier stage of the co-creation process for discovering emerging scenarios, usages and behaviours through live scenarios in real or virtual environments.
Experimentation: implement the proper level of technological artefacts to experience live scenarios with a large number of users while collecting data which will be analysed in their context during the evaluation activity.
Evaluation: assess new ideas and innovative concepts as well as related technological artefacts in real life situations through various dimensions such as socio-ergonomic, socio-cognitive and socio-economic aspects; make observations on the potentiality of a viral adoption of new concepts and related technological artefacts through a confrontation with users' value model
