Living lab

What are living labs?

In order to create attractive living spaces and to guarantee the competitiveness of local economy, user-centred, open innovation ecosystems have been created. Since there is no better way to fulfil the users’ requirements than testing and developing certain processes in real-life scenarios and integrating the users in the development process, cities have become testbeds for innovative solutions where civil participation is encouraged. With their user co-creation approach, Living Labs integrate research and innovation processes in real-life communities and settings.

In this way, they are creative social spaces where users can experience and design their own future. Testing products and policies in real-life scenarios helps improve them and adapt them to the users’ needs. Therefore, Living Labs are implemented as efficient ways for process and product development in many different branches and areas of the everyday life. Despite the implementation in various fields, Living Labs share main characteristics such as co-creation, active user-involvement, real-life setting, multi-stakeholder participation and a multi-method approach.

Purpose of living labs

Living Labs are practice-driven organisations aiming to facilitate and foster open and collaborative innovation. In this way, these collaborative testbeds are created in order to develop new solutions by co-creation among citizens, research organisations, companies, municipalities and federal government. Including the different stakeholders in the development process is the best way to find joint value solutions. Even if Living Labs include all stakeholders in the experimentation and evaluation procedure, they are characterized by high user-orientation, which means that their main purpose is creating processes appropriate to the users’ needs. In the urban context, Living Labs search for innovations in the development of ecological and sustainable processes, new solutions for social and cultural life and the creation of successful economic procedures.

In order to produce sustainable results, users should not only be observed objects in the Living Lab approach but become creative subjects themselves by contributing values and ideas. In this way, Living Labs are the perfect environment for the development of innovative solutions appropriate for the users’ needs.

Living labs are not just conventional testbeds

Academic and industrial researchers use testbeds for evaluating their results in a larger environment. Conventional testbeds are characterized by a high level of control and homogenous test fields with a single focus. Whereas these controlled testbeds are great for early stage experiments, realistic testing environments are needed for further research. Considering the fact that cities are far from being homogenous areas, experimentation in real-life environment is crucial especially for developing urban solutions. Therefore, the multidisciplinary, user-focused Living Lab approach is perfect for testing innovative urban solutions.