Webergence Blog

Living Lab Research Landscape: From User Centred Design and User Experience towards User Cocreation

marcpallot — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:56:46 GMT

Abstract

New paradigms, such as Open Innovation (Chesbrough, 2003) and Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2004) as well as Living Labs operating as a User Centred Open Innovation Ecosystem (Pallot, 2009), promote a more proactive role of users in the R&D process. However, a number of existing methods for involving users are abundantly described in the literature, such as Lead User (Von Hippel, 2005), User Driven Innovation (Von Hippel, 1986), User Centred Design (Von Hippel, 2005) and User Created Content (O’Reilly, 1998) as well as User Co-Creation (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000). This paper explores the domain landscape of Living Lab research, based on the landscape of human-centred design research (Sanders & Stappers, 2008; Sanders, 2008) and later introduced in the domain of Living Lab research (Mulder & Stappers, 2009). It also discusses the links with existing theories such as Social Capital Theory (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998) and Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986) as well as Socio-Emotional Intelligence Theory (Goleman, 1998). It also explores the creation of User Group Experience concept for bringing the socio-emotional perspective (Norman, 1995; 1998; 2004; 207; Goleman, 1998) into User Experience (Fleming, 1998) that appears too much focusing on individual users and usability.

Here is the link to the full paper

Collaborative Working Environments - Distance Factors Affecting Collaboration

marcpallot — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:57:24 GMT

Abstract:

New paradigms such as Open Innovation (Chesbrough, 2003) and User Centred Design (Von Hippel, 2005) as well as User Centred Open Innovation Ecosystem (Pallot, 2009a) promote a distributed collaboration approach. However, a number of identified distances (Pallot, 2010a), abundantly described in the literature, raise collaboration barriers which affect the effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration. This paper presents the results of a survey on collaboration barriers, built from a list of collaboration distance factors, which was conducted from June 2007 to June 2008, and discusses the findings (Pallot, 2009b). It also explores the role of Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) and collaboration tools in creating, compressing or bridging collaborative distances and raising or overcoming related collaboration barriers (Pallot & Bergmann, 2010b).

Here is the link to the full paper.

Take a look at the ECOSPACE newsletter double issue n�9 & 10

marcpallot — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:32:56 GMT

ECOSPACE newsletter double issue n°9 & 10 including latest project development on the Collaborative Environment Reference Architecture and Basic Collaborative Services as well as Shaping the Future of ENoLL and AMI Communities.

Take a look at the ECOSPACE videos

marcpallot — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:03:27 GMT

Take a look at the 4 short videos about Collaborative Working Environments produced by the ECOSPACE project:

Introducing the ECOSPACE Vision
Presenting Trends & Paradigms related to Collaboration
Showing Concepts & Tools supporting Collaborative Environments
Overviewing Architecture and Interoperable Collaborative Services

Engaging Users into Research and Innovation: The Living Lab Approach as a User Centred Open Innovation Ecosystem

marcpallot — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:44:39 GMT

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)

Interoperable Collaborative Environments

marcpallot — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:08:16 GMT

The ECOSPACE project is making progress on the realisation of Interoperable Collaborative Working Environments (ICWE) as a promise about having a kind of mobile phone GSM standard communication protocol for collaborative tools that they could interact with each other in order to better serve the users.

The motivation is to have collaboration tools interacting with one another in a simple way as it is for people when they are giving a phone call or sending an email. It is in fact a standardised communication protocol that makes them transparently interoperable in such a way that users do not need to worry about what mobile phone or emailing tool others are using and whether they are compatible.

Take a look at the updated ECOSPACE project webpages!

There will be soon an official announcement about the standardisation activity regarding the ECOSPACE contributions (CERA, BCS, CoCoS, SIOC++, D2C) to the ICOM TC at the OASIS.

ECOSPACE was running an OCA (Open Collaborative Architecture) labelised demo about interoperable collaborative environments at the ICT2008 exhibition in Lyon last November in order to demonstrate the ICWE approach and feasibility.

Take a look at the Living Labs Corner stands in the ICT2008 Exhibition!

Take a look at the ECOSPACE newsletter special issue dedicated to Shared Workspace Interoperability

marcpallot — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:06:59 GMT

Following the first special issue of the ECOSPACE Newsletter which was dedicated to the topic of Living Lab, here is the second special issue dedicated to the topic of interoperability within Collaborative Environments. ECOSPACE project is very active in the Open Collaborative Architecture Working Group (OCA WG) where other Collaborative Environments Integrated Projects (IP)are also involved, such as Collaboration@Rural, CoSpaces, ECOSPACE, and LABORANOVA. OCA is a forum where researchers and engineers from involved IP and STREPS projects discuss, share and compare Collaborative Environment platforms, in order to elaborate architecture and design recommendations.

CWE'08 papers are online and available for free

marcpallot — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 23:30:59 GMT

All papers on Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) are online and available for free within the ICE'2008 conference proceedings

Click on the following topics:

Shared Workspace and Group Blogging Experimentation through a Living Lab approach

marcpallot — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:16:44 GMT

Whether you have an interest in Living Labs and ICT (Information and Communication Technology) artefacts exploration and experimentation then take a look at the following paper which has been presented at the CWE'08 event that took place during the ICE'2008 conference in Lisbon from 23 to 25 June 2008.

Here is the link to this paper which is reporting about an empirical study conducted through a Living Lab approach and through Focus Group Interviews:

Shared Workspace and Group Blogging Experimentation through a Living Lab approach.pdf

Take a look at the ECOSPACE newsletter special issue fully dedicated to Living Labs

marcpallot — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:51:10 GMT

This is the first special issue of the ECOSPACE Newsletter which is dedicated to the topic of Living Lab. All Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) Integrated Projects (IP), namely Collaboration@Rural, CoSpaces, ECOSPACE, LABORANOVA and WearIT@Work projects are implementing a Living Lab approach in order to further explore, experiment and evaluate the concept of user-centred research and innovation.

Within the ECOSPACE project, there were some discussions about the eventual differentiation in between Experience and Application Research (EAR, 2004) and Living Lab. In fact, EAR has been proposed by the ISTAG committee in 2004 as a means of addressing the challenge of creating a human-centred approach to R&D in ICT Ambient Intelligence for supporting integrated research and concurrent assessment of Ambient Intelligence technologies and systems. While the definition of EAR is quite clear, it was almost impossible to identify any published Living Lab definition and, at the same time, there were many different Living Lab visions and understanding....

In this special issue you will find a Living Lab definition. This is not necessarily "THE" definition but at least has the merite of existing as a discussion and argumentation space.

Come to ICE'2008 and interact with the CWE and Living Labs research community

marcpallot — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 10:18:39 GMT

The "ICE2008 Final Programme" including the Collaborative Working Environments (CWE08) track is now available for download (see all provided links below) and to disseminate it to your colleagues and contacts that could be interested.

All CWE projects are participating to the CWE track in organising special sessions, workshops, training and demonstrations.

Look at the "CWE08 Track Description" which has a more detailled description of the different sessions.

Come and see the progress all CWE projects have made in the area of CWE since they started in April 2006.

There will be an important "not to be missed" Living Labs feedback workshop where CWE IP projects (group of Integrated Projects funded by the European Commission under FP6) will be reporting their current experiences in terms of lessons learned, current gaps and research challenges.

Look at the "Training and Demonstrations" description

Registration form is available on the ICE conference website

Come and join us in Lisbon!

Towards INFRALLABS, a Research Infrastructure on Experience and Application Research for Living Labs

marcpallot — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:19:48 GMT

INFRALLABS is the name given to the project of building up an EU overall Research Infrastructure dedicated to User-centred and Multidisciplinary Research also known as "Experience and Application Research" (EAR). The acronym EAR has been created by the ISTAG committee and the concept is described in the EAR ISTAG Report 2004.

Take a look at the ECOSPACE Introduction video

marcpallot — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:13:46 GMT

Take a look at the ECOSPACE video introducing the topic of Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) which is rather Collaborative Web Environment in the case of the ECOSPACE EU IP project.

Producing a video about a research project, even a short one, is a real challenge, especially when the allocated budget doesn't allow you to do what you would love to do...

One may think that introducing a research project subject is quite obvious and straight forward. I've discovered it is not..... Furthermore, there is the storyboard and its messages, the animation design and the created atmosphere, find the proper music and sounds to illustrate the story and complete the story atmosphere.

I've learnt a lot with this project introduction video...and feel more ready now for the second part which will be presenting the research and concepts developed within the project. Fortunately, I've already prepared a prototype with most of the concepts to be translated into an animation which will have most probably a different style less ironic and humoristic views....

Take a look at it and post your comments on this blog entry as I'm curious to read your reaction!

From Web2.0 towards Web3.0, yet another buzzword or is there some reality behind it?

marcpallot — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 18:39:13 GMT

Sometime ago, almost 2 years ago (time is passing so fast....), I've been turning inside-out the concept of Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) into Collaborative Web Environments.

The first good point is that one can realise they have the same acronym: "CWE", so not necessarily a big revolution....

The second one, beside having the same acronym, is that "Collaborative Working Environments" looks like a close environment while "Collaborative Web Environments" looks like a much more open one!

Yes, everyone of us is able to make the statement that working, learning, playing, sporting, familying and other social activities are more and more loosing their borders, as clearly separated activities with pre-fixed time-slots. They are merging into a multi-activity exciting life where everyone becomes free to decide for having a specific activity at the most appropriate time in order to be the most effective and efficient......freedom, motivation, effectiveness and efficiency altogether to better fulfil all life objectives and not only learning and working ones!

Fortunately, Web2.0 is paving the way for a more social web in humanising a bit the previously "cold" web environment at a stage that "cold" becomes "cool" environment.

For sure, it's not yet fully a "conviality" space....some more progress needed...still.

Currently many people are adopting Web2.0 but what's the next emerging step?

One may think that moving from the social web towards the collaborative web could be the most appropriate step to augment our collaboration abilities.

After all, social activities are catalysing sharing among people from which new knowledge is emerging.

However, only collaborative activities can help to turn emerging new knowledge into something more concrete such as researching to better understand phenomena, designing prototype to experiment new concepts and business models co-created with users and making valuable observations within Living Labs!

Then all stakeholders can decide altogether whether this new knowledge is mature and valuable enough to be turned into a product or services or both.

Conclusion: the next move from Web2.0 "The Social Web", beside the fact that it can be called Web3.0 as a clear illustration, will most probably be "The Collaborative Web".

That was our starting vision when we launched ECOSPACE, an EU funded research project, in May 2006, devoted to Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) and Living Labs.

To know more about this project: http://www.ami-communities.eu/wiki/ECOSPACE

Arghhh! where're my sun glaces? UWA is too much shining!!!

marcpallot — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:10:13 GMT

Netvibes is pushing UWA (Universal Widget API) on the social-networking stage.....are users/members communities going to adopt it?

The Google initiated OpenSocial highly strategic movement is still the current hot topic emerging as a potential standard for sharing people networks, profiles and much more....which might be a great initiative if sufficiently opened to become a real standard that everyone can contribute to it.....let's see what's is going to be in the up-coming weeks and months...

However, Netvibes, one of the OpenSocial launching partners, is already telling us that it doesn't answer the main question: what about the application container? are developers going to code several versions of their applications in using different containers according to the selected platforms?

Take a look at the UWA Specification!

At Netvibes, they are claiming that as soon as the technology will be mature enough then all existing social APIs will be integrated as plugins into UWA, their Universal Widegt API.......then click the music in your widget and let's dance...the "universal widget dance" on the web!!

Who's orchestrating?: Google? Netvibes? .....?

About UWA

The Universal Widget API is developed by Netvibes as a way for widgets to be available on every widget platforms or blog systems: Netvibes of course, but also iGoogle, Apple Dashboard, Opera, Windows Vista, Live.com and more...

Arghhhhh! where's my umbrella? It's raining widgets and blidgets!!!

marcpallot — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 17:38:48 GMT

Take a look at widget and blidget examples

Come to ICE'2008 Lisbon, Portugal, 23-25 June 2008

marcpallot — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 17:34:11 GMT

Take a look at the ICE'2008 announcement and Call-for-Papers I've posted in the CWE Newsblog.

Come to ICE'2008 Lisbon, Portugal, 23-25 June 2008, to join the research community and share the latest research progress in the domains of CE (Concurrent Engineering), CWE (Collaborative Working Environments, Open Innovation, Living Labs and much more...

OpenSocial, the new standard to share people networks, profiles and much more

marcpallot — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:12:37 GMT

Here is a short note, written into the CWE (Collaborative Working Environments) NewsBlog, about OpenSocial, the Google initiated open API to share people networks, profiles and much more among social networking tools to enable users/members to create new "social" applications.

Take a look here

Collaboration barriers and enablers

marcpallot — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:14:46 GMT

Take a look at the two following fascinating electronic surveys that are composed of several electronic polls.

The first one is dedicated to Collaboration Barriers and the second one to Collaboration Enablers.

Take few minutes to vote as well and influence the resulting figures according to your own experience on the subject.

Here are the links:

Collaboration Barriers

Collaboration Enablers

Something or someone suddenly emerging

marcpallot — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:33:04 GMT

Sometimes one may find on the web something or someone that was not expected at all. In fact searching the web for something or someone specific you know before is most probably what everyone is currently doing.

At the opposite I should confess that it is very exciting to search for something you didn't know before or someone you never heard about......surprisingly, yes it works!

Recently, I found on the web a very nice singer having the same family name as mine that I was not expecting to find at all. Even I was not searching for a singer but rather about the potential dissemination of a family name and it is fascinating to see how in some cases a family name is spreading around the world. Like if it was propagating by some magic process.

As a proof take a look here

Why Webergence and Webergic Collaboration?

marcpallot — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:30:29 GMT

The first meaning of Webergence could be the users’ highly expected technological convergence where the term convergence is used in reference to the synergistic combination of voice and telephony features, data and productivity applications, music and video onto a single network.

The second complementary meaning is emergence on the web where the term “emergence” is a term used in Philosophy, Systems Theory and the Sciences to describe the development of complex self-organized systems.

Emergence could be virtually considered as the third entity spontaneously generated when several, from 2 to an infinite number, entities are collaborating. It is well-known that the third (virtual) entity is greater than the sum of the collaborating entities.

To Goldstein, emergence refers to "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems. “[Goldstein 1999]

"Self-organization is a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source. Self-organizing systems typically often display emergent properties.

An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective entity. Merely having a large number of interactions is not enough by itself to guarantee an emergent behaviour."

Now, looking at the web, it appears to behave like an open and self-organised system diplaying emergent properties where people not only consume information but also feed it with new information they very often just created after digesting the ones they have just consumed. So, all those people are collaborating to the Web within their own specific domains of interest without to share a common goal to be achieved. Sometimes, according to the Group Forming Network theory, they are constituting a community of interest and join their force to make something new emerging on the Web (i.e. Wikipedia). As anyone can state it, they are many things simultaneously emerging on the Web and even so many things that it is almost impossible for an individual to encompass all the newly created stuff.

Therefore, I decided to name this style of collaboration "Webergic" in reference of the Web, emergence theory and symbiotic or stimergic collaboration styles. This Webergic collaboration style is really fascinating as it combines symbiotic goal driven collaboration,stimergic community shared goal driven or "mass" collaboration style and the emerging no-goal or stocastically driven collaboration style.

I let you guess which collaboration style is the most performing in term of creativity until I'll write a new entry and a specific article on this subject of Webergence and Webergic Collaboration!

Are wiki, blogging and web2.0 bridging collaborative distances?

marcpallot — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 16:16:29 GMT

It is widely recognised that a number of various factors are affecting collaboration effectiveness and efficiency. Those factors are creating different types of distance among people having to work together whatever is their geographic location, local language, cultural environment, communication infrastructure, social network and local regulation.

A recent literature review has allowed us to identify a number of factors grouped into twenty factor types or classes that are tentatively clustered into an overall concept named “collaborative distance”. This overall concept of collaborative distance has presently four dimensions in order to distinguish structural, social, technical and legal aspects.

Collaboration barriers are generated by factors creating different types of collaborative distance impacting negatively collaboration effectiveness and efficiency. For sure, if there are factors creating distance then there are also factors acting as collaboration enablers which are bridging or compressing distance.

Nowadays, wiki, blogging and web20 are trying to bridge structural, technical and social distances but how far do we understand their respective potential impact?

To answer this above interesting question, an instructive electronic survey has been recently launched by a CWE (Collaborative Working Environment) EU research project. This survey is in fact composed of two complementary electronic polls and is intended to collect different views about the following mentioned collaboration barriers and enablers based on voters' own experience forged during collaborative projects. Each of the two polls is giving a list of factors for which voters have to express their opinion about their respective potential impact.Those two electronic polls and their resulting figures are currently available at the following links:

Collaboration barriers

Collaboration enablers

What is a Living Lab?

marcpallot — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:09:10 GMT

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.

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.

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.

Last but not least, the following document about "living lab" explaination/history is from Richard Ennals.

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".

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 joint eProfessionals Living Lab dedicated to the research environment.

Group or Community blogging

marcpallot — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:59:38 GMT

During a previous EU funded IST research project, named COMIST, we have experimented individual's blogging across several communities where each member can have his own "my blog" while the overall blog is addressing all communities' members. This blogging tool has been developed with Drupal (can be visited here) within a wiki based communities website.

We have gained knowledge about this new blogging approach and came to the conclusion that Group Blogging could be a great tool for any collaborative environment where users can decide to have an individual public blog and/or a private or public group blog. Group here represents any size from a small project team, at least 2 persons, up to a very large community of people composed of thousands of members. Group members can decide to have only themselves creating, reading and commenting entries which means a fully private group blog. Another option is to have only members creating entries but anyone(anonymous users) reading and commenting entries. In this specific case, this group blog can be named "newsblog" as there are several writters and plenty of readers (public). In this case this is a semiprivate or semipublic blog. A third option consists to have a fully public blog where anyone can create, read and comment entries. In this last case, it means than anyone can contribute to the blog based on his own interest to do so.

For sure, all entries have tags allowing users to easily find entries related to one or several specific topics. One may think it is more or less like a previous wellknown tool which was named "forum"....but it doesn't work like a traditional forum as one can decide to add an entry (article) about something he want to keep trace as being useful for himself as well as for others (i.e. best practice). With this kind of entry, the author doesn't really expect others to comment or even create a debate.

One may argues that the most interesting aspect of this group blogging is that blogging becomes a social activity. In fact, everyone can identify others having interest in their blog entries if and only if bloggers are identified, at least with a nickname, as a registered member of this community blog. Furthermore, tags can also be linked to community's members, which in return means that one can identify similar or connected interest with others through a comparison of most used (favourite) tags.

Group or Community Blogging constitutes an interesting field of research which is pursued within the EU IST funded project named ECOSPACE. To know more about this project: http://www.ami-communities.eu/wiki/ECOSPACE