A Living Lab is a user-centred open innovation ecosystem integrating concurrent research and innovation processes within a business-citizens-government partnership.

It is intended to:

• Engage all stakeholders, especially user communities, at the earlier stage of Research and Innovation for discovering emerging scenarios, usages and behaviours;
• Bring together technology push and market pull (i.e. crowdsourcing, crowdcasting) into a diversity of views, constraints and Knowledge Sharing;
• Explore, experiment, and evaluate (including socio-ergonomic, socio-cognitive and socio-economic aspects) new ideas and innovative concepts as well as related artefacts in real life situation;
• Observe the potentiality of a viral adoption of new artefacts through a confrontation with user’s value models.

Methodologies already exist for involving users in the innovation process, such as Lead User created by Von Hippel in 1986 and recently characterised as User-Centric Innovation in NPD (Bligram; Brem; Voigt, 2008) while design of most objects is still felt by users through the generated emotional connection as explained in Norman’s book Emotional Design (Norman, 2005).

Various models of User Centred Design, such as Cooperative Design (Erlbaum, 1991), Participatory Design (Schuler, Namioka, 1997) and Contextual Design (Bayer & Holtzblatt, 1998), are intended to consider user requirements right from the beginning. These 3 models of UCD are compliant with the Human-centred Design Processes for Interactive Systems (ISO13407).

Last but not least, Experience Design (Aarts & Marzano, 2003) is more focusing on the user experience quality, through the use of interaction model impacting user perception, than on the number of functionalities.

Beside these formal methodologies, the Web environment has also induced user-centred approaches such as Web2.0 where users are creating content, Crowdsourcing for opening call-for-solutions to individuals and communities (i.e. Innocentive), Mass Collaboration where a large number of users are creating content to serve the community, Wisdom of Crowds (Surowiecki, 2004) for aggregating individual and community opinions.

However, there is a need to formalise both a LL process and a LL platform where to share knowledge and crystallise the collective work, including social intelligence, of multidisciplinary teams and user communities.

It is proposed to articulate the various activities around a technology platform offering Science and Innovation Services for designing, exploring, experimenting and evaluating innovative scenarios and solutions. Hence, new concepts, artefacts and solutions will emerge from the resulting increase of knowledge."

References

• Aarts, Emile H. L.; Stefano Marzano (2003). The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence. 010 Publishers. p. 46. ISBN 9789064505027.
• Beyer, H. & Holtzblatt, K. (1998). Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN: 1-55860-411-1
• Bilgram, V.; Brem, A.; Voigt, K.-I. (2008). User-Centric Innovations in New Product Development; Systematic Identification of Lead User Harnessing Interactive and Collaborative Online-Tools, in: International Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 419-458.
• ISO 13407:(1999), titled Human-centred design processes for interactive systems, is an ISO Standard providing Guidance on human-centred design activities throughout the life cycle of interactive computer-based systems.
• ISTAG Report on Experience Application Research (EAR) (2004). “Involving Users in the Development of Ambient Intelligence”. European Commission – IST 2004
• Erlbaum, L (1991). Design At Work - Cooperative design of Computer Systems, Greenbaum & Kyng (eds)
• Pallot, M. (2009). The Living Lab Approach: A User Centred Open Innovation Ecosystem. Webergence Blog ().
• Schuler, Namioka (1997). Participatory Design, Lawrence Erlbaum 1993 and chapter 11 in Helander’s Handbook of HCI, Elsevier 1997
• User Experience (http://www.uxnet.org)
• Von Hippel, E. (1986). Lead users: a source of novel product concepts. Management Science 32, 791–805)