Rural Living Labs
From Ruralinclusion
Contents |
What is a Living Lab?
Living Labs, open innovation, eInclusion, rural areas and administrative burden are concepts that are connected with the Rural Inclusion project.
The main goal of this project is the reduction of administrative burdens in rural areas, to facilitate the offering of innovative services by public administration in rural areas. Open innovation led by users is the methodology used in the project to create services close to the user requirements.
Until January 25th 2010 there was an invitation for the 4th Wave of ENoLL (European Network of Living Labs) Membership. ENoLL has received 118 membership applications from 36 different countries.
There are different definitions, with methodologies associated to them, to explain the concept of Living Labs. Two of the most prominent ones are
- The Living Lab concept was developed by Professor William J. Mitchell, of the MIT Media Lab and School of Architecture: "Living Labs represent a user-centric research methodology for sensing, prototyping, validating and refining complex solutions in multiple and evolving real life contexts."
- A Living Lab is both a methodology for User Driven Innovation (UDI) and the organizations that primarily use it.
A Living Lab is about experimentation and co-creation with real users in real life environments, where users together with researchers, firms and public institutions look together for new solutions, new products, new services or new business models. But also Living Labs are about societal involvement, about promoting innovation in a societal basis, involving academia, SMEs, public institutions and large companies in an Open Innovation process that because happens in real environments has an immediate impact. This is how Living Labs aim to contribute to a new Innovation System where users and citizens become active actors and not only passive receivers.
Living Labs are supported by the European policy , the i2010 Policy Framework promote and support user-driven open innovation methodology in the Directorate General Information Society and Media cutting across the different challenges under the ICT priority of:
- the different challenges under the ICT priority of the Co-operation programme of the EU 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7)
- the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (CIP)
- other actions of the European Commission
The methodology applied in this project is based on experiences acquired in previously developed and implemented projects like Collaboration at Rural (C@R) and Comunidades de Investigación para la Salud y la Vida Independiente (CISVI).
Rural Living Labs Methodology
User Centric Approach
The basic idea of Living Labs is to involve the user in the innovation process. The user can contribute with ideas, experiences and knowledge from his daily life and the interaction with the products, services or applications. This approach contrasts with the technology-centric approach.
Taking into account this approach, the basic idea of Living Labs is to gain access to the ideas, experiences, and knowledge that users possess, based on their daily needs of support from products, services, or applications. The user-centric approach in Living Labs consists of involving human beings, citizens and the civic society as a source of innovative ideas (CoreLabs 2006). Living Lab is built on co-operation with users to support creativity and these calls for an efficient interaction with a large population. There are two aspects important to consider when interacting with a larger population: the ability to capture the ideas and inputs from a large population and the ability to evaluate and understand technology-use in a specific context.
The core of Living Labs is the involvement of users throughout all innovation processes; thereby, the innovation system becomes human-centric, in contrast to technology-centric.
User Involvement
The next component identified by the methodology is the user involvement. The idea is to involve the users or beneficiaries of the new service/product/idea in all the innovation processes.
However, some advantages and disadvantages of user involvement are detailed in the table below:
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|
| Involving beneficiaries empowers them | People may not wish to be involved |
| Innovation according to needs and views of beneficiaries | Expectations of beneficiaries may be raised only to lead to disappointment |
| Users can monitor the progress | There may be conflict between what is expected by the ‘research community’ and what is delivered by users |
One of the most important issues in the Living Lab approach, while carrying out innovation activities are the continuous user involvement initiatives.
- In order to boost user involvement initiatives, several activities have been carried out, such as:
- Identification of each LL’s stakeholders.
- Identification of end-users that can help development teams to define and validate software collaboration tools.
- Stakeholders involvement in Living Lab strategic planning.
- Ask for commitment in the activities plan to reach the Living Labs Objective.
- Validation of prototypes elaborated to identify and manage the requirements assigned to software collaboration tools.
- Semi-structured interviews with users. Living labs leaders will interview a sample of users to contribute to the initial set of requirements, focusing on detailed description of use cases.
Building local user communities
The innovation groups are composed of local stakeholders including companies, policy makers, public authorities, end-users, with different roles and position (i.e. from employee to manager). 
Community : the people with common interests living in a particular area (Merriam-Webster Dictionary).
In this case, we are nearer to this definition: A community is a group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons
Living Labs need to create a local user community to boost the participation, promoting to share experiences and enriching the feedback obtained.
Focus on value creation
The LL methodology, as the figure 2 shows, is present in all the innovation cycle. The value creation is basic to reduce the pre-commercial 
In the chart to the right, this difference is represented.
Pursue openness strategies
Information should be freely shared, easy to access, not only to members of the living labs, but also to other communities that can be active participants, bringing in new ideas and good practices.
Living Labs are open innovation environments, due to pursue openness strategies.
The Living Labs use ideas from the community of users and from the companies in an environment with real-life settings.
Phasing, cyclic and spiral development
Once the LLs are established (communities created, user involvement ensured, communication and monitoring tools in place), innovation activities can start iteratively, appropriately guided by the organizers’ interventions.
The typical evolving phases are:
- Creation of user scenarios;
- Limited experimentation on simple use cases, in order to achieve quick results and be able to learn jointly and continue the process further.
- Monitoring and evaluation of Living Labs
Interventions consist in the identification of user needs, problems to be solved, formulation of hypotheses for solution, planning further developments. The outcome is a joint experience on the learning and evaluation of solutions. This is what makes the LL evolve.
