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Living Labs have sprung around the globe as key and effective research infrastructures, involving several stakeholders in a user-centered, iterative, open innovation ecosystem, where co-creation takes place in a real-life environment.
In modern times, technology is developed at an ever-increasing rate, and new products are often discarded before living up to their potential. The cause of this often resides in the traditional methods by which products are introduced into the market, where end-users test these new products only after they have been acquired. If a product doesn’t fulfill the customer’s needs, it will be replaced, and if the company that developed such a product doesn’t have the capability to introduce rapid updates and improvements, it will ultimately fail to continue growing.
Living Labs were introduced in the late 1990s to address such a problem, specifically focusing on the development, testing, and improvement of sustainable domestic technologies. The first Living Lab mention can be traced back to William J. Mitchell of the MIT Media Lab in the late 1990s (Kidd et al., 1999), who used the term “Living Lab” to define a user-centered research method, with the goal of testing, prototyping, validating, and improving, in a real-life context, solutions for challenges related to health, energy and creativity (Nesti, 2017).
Throughout the years, the Living Lab concept has evolved into a more robust research approach and environment, where disciplines such as energy efficiency (Ståhlbröst, 2012), smart cities (Schaffers et al., 2011), applied teaching in sustainability (Evans et al., 2015), mobility (Rizzoli et al., 2014), assisted living (Krieg-Brückner et al., 2010), healthcare (Schrevel et al., 2020), among many others, are addressed in real-life environments.
Over the last two decades, “Living Labs” have sprung around the globe as key and effective research infrastructures, involving several stakeholders (e.g. companies, citizens, researchers, students, etc.) in a user-centered, iterative, open innovation ecosystem, where co-creation takes place in a real-life environment. According to Ballon et al. (2005), a Living Lab is “an experimentation environment in which technology is given shape in real-life contexts and in which end-users are considered co-producers”.
Ståhlbröst (2012) defines five Key Principles by which Living Labs should operate: “Value, Openness, Realism, Influence, and Sustainability”, all of which give shape to the innovation process enclosed. Therefore, Living Labs are multi-stakeholder research environments, where products and services are tested by end-users and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations lead to the co-creation and transfer of knowledge, the understanding of user needs, engagement, and behavior, as well as the opportunity to improve the products and services through actionable feedback.
To the best of our knowledge, the biggest network of Living Labs is that of ENoLL (“European Network of Living Labs”, 2021), which is a non-profit organization founded in 2006. So far, the Network comprises more than 470 Living Labs focusing on a wide range of research activities.
Universities present a great opportunity for the implementation of Living Labs. As Nesti (2017, p.6) states “Universities are important players, simply because they already have structures, technologies, and trained staff to implement Living Labs”. Thereupon, Universities can use their facilities and their faculty’s expertise to develop co-creation activities with students, that result in business value for companies, technological evaluations and improvements, and an enriched teaching/learning process.
The Living Lab approach and environment is still under constant development and evolution; however, it promises an effective tool for innovative research and increased product and service understanding, improvement, and acceptance by its end-users.
This year, at the Institute for the Future of Education in Tecnológico de Monterrey, we’ve begun working towards the establishment of a Living Lab on Education, the “IFE Living Lab”, which will unite several stakeholders/users (EdTech companies and startups, researchers, faculty members, students, staff, among others) to perform research in educational innovation through co-creation activities in real-life settings. We invite you to learn more about the initiative on our webpage (https://ifelldh.tec.mx).
References:
Ballon, P., Pierson, J., & Delaere, S. (2005). Test and experimentation platforms for broadband innovation: Examining European practice. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1331557
European network of living labs. (2021). https://enoll.org/ (accessed: 07.27.2021)
Evans, J., Jones, R., Karvonen, A., Millard, L., & Wendler, J. (2015). Living labs and co-production: University campuses as platforms for sustainability science. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 16, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2015.06.005
Kidd, C., Orr, R. J., Abowd, G., Atkeson, C., Essa, I., MacIntyre, B., Mynatt, E. D., Starner, T., & Newstetter, W. (1999). The aware home: A living laboratory for ubiquitous computing research. CoBuild. https://doi.org/10.1007/1070543217
Nesti, G. (2017). Living labs: A new tool for co-production? Smart and sustainable planning for cities and regions: Results of sspcr 2015 (pp. 267–281). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44899-216
Krieg-Brückner, B., Röfer, T., Shi, H., & Gersdorf, B. (2010). Mobility assistance in the Bremen ambient assisted living lab. GeroPsych: The Journal of Gerontopsychology and Geriatric Psychiatry, 23, 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1024/1662-9647/a000009
Rizzoli, A., Rudel, R., Förster, A., Corani, G., Cellina, F., Pampuri, L., Guidi, R., & Baldassari, A. (2014). Investigating mobility styles using smartphones: Advantages and limitations according to a field study in southern Switzerland. 7th International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software (iEMSs). www.iemss.org/society/index.php/iemss-2014-proceedings
Schaffers, H., Komninos, N., Pallot, M., Trousse, B., Nilsson, M., & Oliveira, A. (2011). Smart cities and the future internet: Towards cooperation frameworks for open innovation. Future Internet Lecture Notes on Computer Science, 6656, 431–446. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20898-031
Schrevel, S., Slager, M., & de Vlugt, E. (2020). I stood by and watched: An autoethnography of stakeholder participation in a living lab. Technology Innovation Management Review, 10, 19–30. https://doi.org/http://doi.org/10.22215/timreview/1400
Ståh
lbröst, A. (2012). A set of key principles to assess the impact of living labs. International Journal of Product Development, 17(1-2), 60–75. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJPD.2012.051154
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