State-of-the-art and good practice in the field of living labs

Abstract

Living Labs are an emerging Public Private Partnership (PPP) concept in which firms, public authorities and citizens work together to create, prototype, validate and test new services, businesses, markets and technologies in real-life contexts, such as cities, city regions, rural areas and collaborative virtual networks between public and private players. The real-life and everyday life contexts will both stimulate and challenge research and development as public authorities and citizens will not only participate in, but also contribute to the whole innovation process. This paper examines the state-of-the art in involving the user and stakeholder organisations into the innovation process in various ongoing, embryonic Living Labs initiatives, examines the key practices that need to be in place for the maturation of the concept and gives examples on how those are currently being deployed. The paper concludes with a section dedicated to identifying areas in which future research is required.

Full text

State-of-the-Art and Good Practice in the Field
of Living Labs
Veli-Pekka Niitamo
1
, Seija Kulkki
2
, Mats Eriksson
3
, Karl A. Hribernik
4
1
Nokia Oyj, Finland, veli-pekka.niitamo@nokia.com
2
Centre for Knowledge and Innovation Research, Helsinki School of Economics, HTC Pinta,
Tammasaarenkatu 3, 00180 Helsinki, Finland, seija.kulkki@hkkk.fi
3
Centre for Distance-spanning Technology (CDT) at Luleå University of Technology SE-971 87
Luleå, Sweden, mats.eriksson@cdt.ltu.se
4
Bremen Institute of Industrial Technology and Applied Work Science, Hochschulring 20
D-28359 Bremen, Germany, {hri,tho}@biba.uni-bremen.de
Abstract
Living Labs are an emerging Public Private Partnership (PPP) concept in which firms, public authorities and citizens
work together to create, prototype, validate and test new services, businesses, markets and technologies in real-life
contexts, such as cities, city regions, rural areas and collaborative virtual networks between public and private
players. The real-life and everyday life contexts will both stimulate and challenge research and development as public
authorities and citizens will not only participate in, but also contribute to the whole innovation process.
This paper examines the state-of-the art in involving the user and stakeholder organisations into the innovation
process in various ongoing, embryonic Living Labs initiatives, examines the key practices that need to be in place for
the maturation of the concept and gives examples on how those are currently being deployed. The paper concludes
with a section dedicated to identifying areas in which future research is required.
Keywords
Living Labs, Collaborative Working Environments, Testbeds, Systemic Innovation, Field Trials
1 Comparison of Test and Experimentation Concepts
As outlined in [Ballon et al 2005], different concepts can be described that address several issues
of bringing technology into the market via what is termed Test & Experimentation Platforms.
Six concept categories are differentiated according to [Ballon et al 2005]: prototyping platforms,
testbeds, field trials, living labs, market pilots and societal pilots. A model of comparison for
these concepts has been developed in which the main factors of differentiation can be
summarized to be:
1. The commercial maturity of what is tested is normally higher in the societal and market
pilots than in comparison to the Living Labs.
2. The level of design focus (as opposed to testing a finished product) is higher in the Living
Lab as compared to testbeds and field trials.
Also, the open nature of the Living Labs is highlighted as opposed to what are sometimes purely
in-house activities.
[Ballon et al 2005] examine a number of initiatives in all six categories, in three European
countries. The initiatives are examined with respect to openness, public involvement, commercial
maturity, vertical scope, scale and duration. Although giving a good overview, the models
proposed leave little room for the major difference in modelling user contribution as feedback
only or co-creation. The model does not cater for any vertical focus regarding application
domains, e.g. eHealth.

A mapping of the various methodological aspects in comparison to the Living Lab approach is
described by Prof Otto Scharmer (MIT, CKIR) as shown in Figure 1, below.
Knowledge Focus
Degree of Participation
Low:
Observation
Traditional Lab
Experimentation
Traditional
Empirical
Social Science
Research
Living Lab
Experimentation
High:
Observation
and Creation
Ethnographical
Observation
Single and Controlled
Contexts
Multiple and
Emerging Contexts
Knowledge Focus
Degree of Participation
Low:
Observation
Traditional Lab
Experimentation
Traditional
Empirical
Social Science
Research
Living Lab
Experimentation
High:
Observation
and Creation
Ethnographical
Observation
Single and Controlled
Contexts
Multiple and
Emerging Contexts
Figure 1: Participation and Context of Innovations
2 The Various Practices Applied in Living Labs
There are many practices and characteristics of Living Labs that need to be put in place in order
to operate satisfactorily. A Living Lab needs to bring access to state-of-the art technology not of
only one kind but often of competing technologies delivered through different business models.
Open cooperation with vendors is crucial including both SMEs and larger firms.
The environment must also bring together various organisations that either utilize technology, or
are candidates for the utilisation of technology in the vertical dimension of a value-chain. The
focus here is on creating innovative applications based on existing technologies as well as on the
creation of future technologies. This may also encompass competing business models or
interests.
The ability to bring public interests into the environment is important to cater for a long-term
operation of systemic innovation. As, especially in Europe, public organisations are often
responsible for overall innovation systems, these organisations should be directly involved in the
operation of Living Labs and be the organisational owner of the concept. Not only should they be
involved in operation, but they should also utilize the Living Labs from a content and application
perspective in order to improve their public sector operations.
Technology Business
User
Figure 2: Focus across Several Dimensions
Living Labs are built upon broad co-operation with the citizen (in his or her role as a citizen,
user, consumer, worker etc) in order to leverage the full creativity potential of the system which
calls for an efficient interaction with a large population. This encompasses two aspects: the
ability to capture ideas and input from the wider population as well as the ability to understand
and evaluate technology use within specific situations. These areas require more focused
research in order to create methods capable of generating the necessary knowledge.
The ability to interact with the users is what distinguishes the Living Lab approach from other,
more traditional supplier-customer partnerships, or previously seen cross-disciplinary

approaches. Altogether, these calls for focus across several dimensions, as shown in Figure 2
above, whilst simultaneously further developing the application.
Comparing various current initiatives in their applications of the practices yields the
recommendation that following key aspects should be implemented. The analysis of the
initiatives described in the following is based on publicly available material, therefore, it should
merely be interpreted as examples of Good Practice in the field.
2.1 Cooperation with Technology and Application Providers
This practice should cater for co-operation with both large players as well as with SMEs as
solution suppliers. It is their products and services that should be influenced and created in the
Living Labs.
Currently, the Freeband initiative is a good example of a broad cooperation with technology
providers from different sectors. It includes some very large firms as well as more technically
niche companies. Also, the setup around Mobile City in Bremen is very well implemented,
including a large amount of SMEs, which are organised within an association (MSG Mobile
Solution Group) in the area of mobile services and application. Furthermore, the Octopus
environment includes many companies but mostly around a specific ICT business model.
2.2 Technology Availability
The Living Lab concept has its foundation in the experimentation with technology together with
users. Having access to state-of-the-art technology in network access, service platforms, terminal
and user interfaces, etc. is therefore key to be able to optimize the results generated.
One of the most advanced such environments can be found at Fraunhofer FOKUS, which
provides access to an impressive collection of technology. Other technologically strong sites
include Mobile City Bremen, Octopus and the CASST centre in Ireland where emerging
technologies for service creation are made available in an open lab setup.
2.3 Vertical Co-operation within the Value Chain
The ability to include a large variety of companies and organisations, in many segments of the
society, is crucial in order to reach the necessary impact.
The Helsinki Virtual Village in Arabianranta has a strong setup involving the full participation
and also including actual service delivery within a part of Helsinki. Testbed Botnia and
Crossroads Copenhagen have established co-operation networks in certain application areas.
2.4 Openness and Neutrality
Avoiding path dependency & lock-in is crucial in order to capture the values created by certain
concepts.
Most initiatives claim openness, such as the Living Lab Västervik, Testbed Botnia, or Mobile
City Bremen. Openness is challenging and it remains to be seen whether all of the mentioned
will remain truly open as there is not that much competition in business or technology models
deployed so far.
A further issue regarding openness is that if one major player utilizes the Living Lab, this might
deter competing players (technology or business model) from participating in the same
environment.
2.5 Public Involvement
Besides purely funding related reasons, the rationale for public involvement is based on far
broader argumentation. In order to address the full systemic innovation aspects of society and

harness the related potential, public organisations need to utilize Living Labs as an opportunity to
enhance their reformation of basic societal processes.
All of the initiatives listed in this section, except some of the smart house initiatives such as
e2home, are based on public funding. The purpose of that funding varies. In the case of
Freeband, the focus is more towards research, whilst most of the others are focused on creating a
platform for growth. The level of active involvement in the actual utilisation of the Living Labs
for public services varies. Good examples of this are the Living Labs Västervik and Sparknet,
where the environment serves the purpose of creating a platform for public services and the
public commitment to the initiative is high.
2.6 User Involvement
The most interesting aspect regarding Living Labs is their ability to involve users
(citizens/consumers) in the creation process. This encompasses several challenges, but
simultaneously promises incredible opportunities if the right approach is taken.
Most of the initiatives view the user as an R&D object rather than a source of innovation. The
user community of Testbed Botnia is a good example of how to conduct basic interaction with a
large group of users. Arabianranta and Sparknet are other examples where larger communities
serve as users of technologies.
2.7 Research Involvement
It is widely accepted that better knowledge about ICT and its usage is required. The ability to
transform and transfer the knowledge created in Living Labs into new areas of research related to
technology as well as the human issues is important.
Here, Freeband has a strong approach in developing novel methodologies for conducting user
evaluation, thereby understanding more about the usage of a particular technology. Most
initiatives related to smart houses also demonstrate sophisticated methodologies and monitoring
equipment.
3 The Governance Needed for and Impact of Living Labs
It has been stated already in this paper that one of the key aspects regarding the nature of the
Living Lab concept is its openness and neutrality in respect to technology or business models.
The reason for this is mainly to enable maximum innovation, by avoiding the problem of path
dependency & lock-in and at the same time optimizing interaction among organisations. The
Living Lab then forms the institutionalisation of the very meeting place for all organisations
involved in a certain innovation system.
This open, neutral approach calls for public involvement not only in funding, but also in the very
operation of the Living Lab. It also calls for new means of governance, leadership, management,
and organizing. These should reflect qualities of open source platforms and favour wide
knowledge sharing and communication, networking and partnering.
In Living Labs there is a need to combine highly self-organized and self-managed processes with
multi-disciplinary R&D and innovation management processes. There must also be in place a
communication culture and collaborative social and technological infrastructure for continuous
shared vision and mission creation, as well as for learning from experience.
However, Living Labs provide an opportunity to ‘compress’, integrate and synthesize the human,
social, economic and technological elements and processes of innovation. Through LivingLabs
the human-centric systemic innovation may emerge through the process (see Figure 3 above)
where technology is created and challenged in interaction with human, social and institutional
systems.

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Figure 3: Network of Living Labs for Human-Centric Systemic Innovation, Market and Industry Creation
with a Global Reach
From a market and industry creation viewpoint, the Living Labs offer a research and innovation
platform across different social and cultural systems, cross-regionally and cross-nationally. As
such, this is a good basis for rapid mass-customization with even a global reach.
On the other hand, Living Labs as a research approach may deal with social and environmental
sustainability as well as other socio-techno-economic impacts that should contribute to the
productivity, creativity and innovativeness of Europe.
A regional, national or European-wide network of Living Labs can strengthen the opportunities
to integrate social innovations with technological innovations on a wider scale that contributes to
socio-economic dynamism, conclusively incorporating regional, national or Europe-wide global
competitiveness, growth and job creation. Europe-wide networks of Living Labs are large-scale
experimentation platforms for new service, business, technology, or even market and industry
creation within ICT.
Such a European Network of Living Labs supports the i2010 policy [European Commission
2005] aiming at a European-wide Information Space being highly effective and inclusive for
everybody, anywhere and anytime. Consequently, the Living Labs may not only be for creation
of converged technologies and industries but even more for the convergence of European
markets having a positive impact on job creation.
Some initiatives for European co-operation has already been launched such as the Special
Interest Group of Living Labs as part of the AMI@Work family of communities
http://www.mosaic-network.org/amiatwork/ and the Living Labs Europe initiative
http://www.livinglabs-europe.com/ stimulating European co-operation in the area.
As a consequence of this identified potential, the Living Lab approach is considered as the
natural candidate for the implementation of large scale demonstration and validation as
recommended by ISTAG [ISTAG 2005]. Furthermore, the capability of involving a large
number of end-users already in the technology innovation phase is expected to boost the societal
impact of the achieved technical breakthrough, in terms of both broad utilisation and delivered
value.
Currently, the existing testbeds throughout Europe do not provide a homogeneous, standardised
approach to the Living Labs methodology by employing proprietary methods and environments
often tailored to specific regional attributes. Of course there is a need to cater for regional
differences but technologies provided at each site represent a small fraction of what is available
on the market and the ability to network together a larger set of technologies is a non-utilized
opportunity.
4 Global Players and their Strategies toward Living Labs
Understanding the market is of course important to all global players, the ICT industry is no
exception. As technology develops and new business models emerges, the need to understand the
threats and opportunities as well as to stay innovative in this changing landscape is maybe more
important now than ever. Global players generally approach public-private partnerships in two
ways
1. Research-only co-operations with leading universities with the purpose of acquiring new
knowledge. As these companies are often involved in complex technology development,
the co-operations tend to be very technology oriented. This is also well reflected in the
eMobility initiative.

2. Co-operations centralized around the business models of those global players. Typically
the companies want to push a certain technology or business model, which is
understandable as they often invested huge amount of money in development.
The Living Lab concept of actually shaping the technology and the applications in a
collaborative setup, thereby creating the understanding of future opportunities, requires a very
open approach resulting in applying concepts sometimes contra dictionary to a specific business
model of a company.
However, as the Living Lab concept gains momentum as one of the major vehicles for
developing future ICT technology and applications global players will have to develop their
relation to the Living Labs.
5 Regional Initiatives on the Path toward Living Labs
The following section includes some examples of regional initiatives related to the proposed
implementation of Living Labs. The order of the examples is arbitrary and does not imply a
system of ranking. None of the examples yet fully complies with the practices described in this
paper.
5.1.1 PlaceLab/House_n (MIT- US).
The mission of the Changing Places/House_n project is to conduct research by designing and
building real living environments - "living labs" - that are used to study technology and design
strategies in context. The PlaceLab is a joint MIT and TIAX, LLC initiative. It is a residential
condominium in Cambridge, Massachusetts, designed to be a highly flexible and multi-
disciplinary observational research facility for the scientific study of people and their interaction
patterns with new technologies and home environments.
5.1.2 CDT Testbed Botnia (Sweden)
Testbed Botnia mission is to bring stakeholders together to interact with its several thousand end-
users. In the environment of Testbed Botnia researchers and companies conduct experiments on
services and applications in a variety of social contexts.
Environments include city centres as well as the more rural settings of northern Sweden. It
involves researchers from various fields through the CDT cooperation.
5.1.3 Mobile City Bremen (Germany)
In cooperation with Bonsai Deutschland Testmarkt Bremen GmbH, a subsidiary of the renowned
market research and opinion polling institute TNS Emnid, the existing infrastructure was
enhanced to create a test market for mobile applications. The acceptance and functioning of new
products, services and solutions are investigated under real conditions. At the same time, Bonsai
analyzes the effects of corresponding advertising and marketing measures focused on the
Bremen test region.
5.1.4 Sparknet (Finland)
Sparknet is an open access netork initiative consisting of several variuos access technologies. Its
open architecture enables new and emerging services possible.
5.1.5 Helsinki Virtual Village – Arabianranta (Finland)
An entire suburb of Helsinki is translated into an example of the future living environment. By
integrating architecture, city planning with modern ICT solutions and services a unique
environment has been created.

5.1.6 Freeband (The Netherlands)
Freeband is a large Dutch research programme on ambient intelligent communication (85 million
euro budget over 7 years), which comprises more than 30 organisations, including all-important
technology providers, knowledge institutes and many representative end user organisations. The
Telematica Instituut manages the Freeband programme, which has a testbed infrastructure and
can be seen as a Living lab.
5.1.7 Crossroads Copenhagen (Denmark)
http://www.videnskabsministeriet.dk/cgi-bin/doc-
show.cgi?theme_id=94750&doc_id=109770&doc_type=27&leftmenu=MINISTERINDLAEGC
rossroads Copenhagen is a network of research institutions, private enterprises and public
organizations. The network strives to strengthen the co-operation between companies and
universities within culture, media and communication technology.
5.1.8 Living Lab Västervik (Sweden)
Living Labs Västervik is a catalyst and a driving force in the development process that started in
Västerviks municipality and Kalmar County to create a modern society structure. During the next
few years the digital society platform will establish a foundation for completely new conditions
to develop organisations, stimulate new business and increase the service for citizens and tourists
in the entire municipality. The focus is the power of innovation and renewal concurrent as
previous experiences is an important part of the development. The ambition is to create a
dynamic environment where citizens, organizations and companies together develop and test
new digital services and products.
5.1.9 Livingtomorrow (The Netherlands, Belgium)
The project plays an informing and sensitizing role: it aims to fascinate the general public and
make them aware of innovations and trends and especially point out what the consequences will
be for their lives. The project involves several disciplines. New software and IT-applications are
predominant throughout the House and Office of the Future. But new ecological and energy-
saving building techniques and new interior trends also play an important role in the building.
5.1.10 The Communications and Software Services Test (CASST) Centre (Ireland)
The centre is a nationally unrivalled mobile communications test facility which can provide a
“3G & Beyond” test bed for real and rapid development, prototyping, interoperability,
conformance testing and validation of wireless and mobile research. The CASST Centre enables
industry and research organisations, who would otherwise be unable to acquire sufficient
hardware and software resources, to realise their business and strategic goals.
6 Conclusion and Need for Further Research
The concept of Living Labs applied in the way as described here is novel. Thus, it requires
substantial research to optimize its operations and methods although already promising.
[Burgelman et al 2004] state that “the construction of artefacts often builds on rather simplistic
assumptions about real situations and conditions of usage”. This is said to be evident in most of
the application areas where ICT is applied. [Burgelman et al 2004] contend that there is a need
for better grounded studies on social changes involved and on the interplay between actors.
The key aspect of differentiation regarding Living Labs in comparison to other forms of co-
operation, clusters etc. is the involvement of the users. As stated in [ISTAG 2005], “the real
challenge may lie in involving users in a sociological sense, that is to say, by taking into account
the micro-context of their everyday lives”

Research is required in order to create comprehensive models and methods by which
experiments can be analysed and values measured. Examples of emerging new approaches are
e.g. the Experience Clip method as outlined in [Isomurso et al 2004]. The field of Ambient
Intelligence puts increasing focus on the social and user dimension as the concept implies the
blending of the physical and virtual environments.
Furthermore, concepts stimulating individual users to take a larger role in the future development
of the knowledge society are required. These will involve several disciplines. The ability to
capture business values and transform those into business models without falling into predefined
concepts is also requiring further methods development.
[Burgelman et al 2004] recommends a number of areas in which further research is proposed:
− Stronger integration of different schools of thought in the social science fields and with
technical research.
− A greater degree of cross-European research.
− Stronger integration of economics oriented schools.
An area of importance when bringing the citizens/consumers into the Living Lab innovation
system described is how to handle the ethical and IPR issues. As private persons become a
source of ideas and innovations, there should be an appropriate rewarding and incentive system
in place that secures pay-back to all the actors involved.
One can say that the Living Lab is a truly multi-disciplinary instrument needed to support the
mass-deployment phase when ICT moves into affecting everyone’s daily life.
Acknowledgement
This work has been partly funded by the European Commission through the IST Project CoreLabs – Co-creative
Living Labs for CWE (No. IST-FP6-035065). The authors wish to acknowledge the Commission for their support.
We also wish to acknowledge our gratitude and appreciation to all the CoreLabs project partners for their
contribution during the development of various ideas and concepts presented in this paper.
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