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The ICT & Infrastructure component outlines the
role that new and existing ICT technology can play
to facilitate new ways of cooperating and co-creating
new innovations among stakeholders. Management
represent the ownership, organization, and policy
aspects of a Living Lab, a Living Lab can be
managed by e.g. consultants, companies or
researchers. The Living Lab Partners & Users bring
their own specific wealth of knowledge and
expertise to the collective, helping to achieve
boundary spanning knowledge transfer. Research
symbolizes the collective learning and reflection that
take place in the Living Lab, and should result in
contributions to both theory and practice.
Technological research partners can also provide
direct access to research that can benefit the
outcome of a technological innovation. Finally,
Approach stand for methods and techniques that
emerge as best practice within the Living Labs
environment. (EC3, 2011)
A Living Lab can also have a specific approach
to innovation. This approach is built on five key
principles. These are: Value, Sustainability,
Influence, Realism and Openness and these should
permeate all Living Lab operations. (EC3, 2011)
In more detail, the key principles can be
described as follows:
• Value: The notion of value and value creation in a
Living Lab concerns several different aspects such
as societal value, economic value, business value
and consumer/user value. A Living Lab might also
provide insights about how users perceive value.
These insights should guide the innovation process
to be able to deliver innovations that are perceived
as valuable from a societal, economical, business,
and a consumer perspective. A Living Lab has the
opportunity to create value based on all aspects of
the value term
• Sustainability: This key principle refers both to
the viability of a Living Lab and to its
responsibility to the wider community in which it
operates. Focusing on the viability of the Living
Lab highlights aspects such as continuous learning
and development over time. Here, the research
component of each Lab plays a vital role in
transforming the everyday knowledge generation
into models, methods and theories. Other
important aspects related to the sustainability of a
Living Lab is the partnership and its related
networks since good cross-border collaboration,
which strengthens creativity and innovation, builds
on trust, and this takes time to build up. Also, in
line with the general sustainability and
environmental trends in society it is equally
important that Living Labs also take responsibility
of its environmental, social, and economic effects.
• Influence: A key aspect of the influence principle
is to view "users" as active and competent partners
and domain experts. As such their involvement
and influence in innovation and development
processes shaping and transforming society is
essential. Equally important is to base these
innovations on the needs and desires of potential
users, and to realize that these users often represent
a heterogeneous group. While users often are
described as drivers and shapers of technology,
they still very often are treated as a homogeneous
and passive group that carry out activities assigned
to them. Hence, one important issue that Living
Labs need to manage is how to assure that
participation, influence and responsibility among
different partners harmonizes with each other and
with the ideology of the user influence of the
project.
• Realism: One of the cornerstones for the Living
Lab approach is that innovation activities should
be carried out in a realistic, natural, real life
setting. Orchestrating realistic use situation and
user behaviour is seen as one way to generate
results that are valid for real markets in Living Lab
operations. However, the aim to create and
facilitate realism is an endeavour that needs to be
grappled with on different levels and in correlation
to different elements such as contexts, users, use
situations, technologies, and partners. The
principle does not separate between the physical
and the online world. Instead it is argued that
activities carried out in both worlds are as real and
realistic to its actors.
• Openness:
The principle of openness emphasizes
that the innovation process should be as open as
possible. The idea is that multiple perspectives
bring power to the development process and
achieve rapid progress. The openness supports the
process of user-driven innovation. In a Living Lab,
digital innovations are created and validated in
collaborative multi-contextual empirical real-world
environments. Openness is crucial for the
innovation process in a Living Lab, where it is
essential to gather a multitude of perspectives that
might lead to faster and more successful
development, new ideas and unexpected business
openings in markets. However, to be able to co-
operate and share in a multi-stakeholder milieu,
different levels of openness between the
stakeholders seems to be a requirement (Bergvall-
Kåreborn et al.).
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