Maurice Mulvenna, University of Ulster

ENRICHING THE RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT PROCESS USING LIVING LAB METHODS: THE TRAIL EXPERIENCE

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A University of Ulster Innovation Lab

Outline

•  TRAIL •  Triple helix •  (e)Challenges •  Northern Ireland •  The case studies •  User-driven methods •  Governance •  The issues •  Concluding remarks

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TRAIL

•  Interdisciplinary •  Open •  Participative •  User-focused

Triple Helix Instantiation

Challenges

•  Inter-disciplinarity •  Sustainability •  User-centered –  Balance design versus engineering –  Avoiding technological determinism

•  Interoperability •  Service evolution •  Business models •  Ethics

Relevance to NI

•  Living Lab –  Lessens risk in innovation –  Speeds up innovation –  Captures real needs at the beginning of the process –  New sources of innovation

•  Using Lead users –  Those that very quickly understand the innovation problem

and articulate their needs because they have acute and latent needs

–  Ensure higher validity, manage drop-out rates/motivation levels, buy-in and overall can carry out more efficient iterations

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Public sector jobs in Northern Ireland

8 Reserved functions include the Northern Ireland Office, Police Service of Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Prison Service, UK Central Government and UK Public Corporations.

Public sector differential

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TRAIL activities

•  Vision: –  Develop participative methods that identify the unmet health-

related needs of ageing, rural dwellers of Northern Ireland and the border counties of Ireland as they age in place

•  Early stage innovation activities encompassing: –  Ideation –  Early research and development, supported by external

funders, in many inter-related areas.

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Ageing Northern Ireland

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Case study examples

•  Night-time telecare-based support for people with dementia

•  Wetness alert sensors for urinary incontinent people with dementia

•  Cross-border telecare services •  Developing interfaces for users with brain injuries •  Community-orientated models for independent living

and ageing in place •  Supporting people with dementia during daytime •  Socially including younger people •  Developing services for older people

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TRAIL Case Study Descriptions Characteristic user Identifying users Identifying needs Evaluating innovation

Person with early stage dementia

Health and welfare organisation

Face-to-face interviews with people with dementia and their carers

Medium scale trials with small numbers of users

Incontinent person with dementia

Health and welfare organisation

Lead user ‘proxy’ Short scale trials with small numbers of users

Elderly, rural dwellers Health and welfare organisation

Face-to-face meetings and workshops

Medium scale trials with medium number of users

People with brain injuries Health and welfare service provider

Lead user / small scale workshops for people with brain injuries and their carers

Small scale trials with small number of users

Elderly people Local council / health and welfare organisation

Region-based surveys of older people / workshops

Bespoke ‘wellness service model’ assessment

People with early stage dementia

Health and welfare organisation

Workshops and interviews with the people with dementia and the carer

Short to medium scale trials with medium numbers of users

Young people, often with self-image issues

Second-level educational institutes

Face-to-face meetings / small scale workshops

Uptake of third level educational courses

Elderly people Local council / health and welfare organisation

Medium scale workshops / users provided with idea capture toolkit

Long scale trials with medium numbers of users

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Methods and tools used in user-driven product or service processes

•  Ideation with Lead Users •  Participatory Design / User Design /

Co-Design

•  Creativity Groups (face to face or online)

•  Suggestion Box (virtual or real)

•  Concept Tests with Lead Users •  Cultural probes

•  Ethnographic techniques

•  (Virtual) product/prototype usability test (with test group/ lead users)

•  Cognitive Walkthroughs

•  Hierarchical value models

•  Dialogism

•  Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

•  Interviews (face to face, online or telephone)

•  Workshops with customers

•  Focus Group Interviews (face to face or online)

•  Market Intelligence Services

•  Log behaviour of users/customers/ social network analysis

•  Market Test •  Time-motion-studies (controlled-,

direct- or field observation)

•  Web surveys

•  Talk Aloud

•  Most memorable experiences

•  Grounded theory

Methods and tools used in user-driven product or service processes

•  Communities of Practice (COP)

•  Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)

•  Seeding, Evolutionary growth, Reseeding (SER) model

•  Wizard of Oz experiment

•  Workshop techniques, e.g., Thinking hats, World Cafe

Steering Committee

Interdisciplinary group (arts, computer science, engineering, health, business, sociology…) of

university researchers

Conception R&D Evaluation

Information escalation

•  ~ 10 forums per year with partners (other research teams, associations, health and social, partners, industrialists…)

•  Past experiences

Activities and actors

Deliverables Project proposals (~5 adopted every year)

Researchers

Health and social

mediators

10-15 end-users per workshop

Workshops (discussions and collection of end

users impressions for about 2 hours, every 3 months during the

project)

Questionnaires, minutes, and audio/video

recordings

Evaluation

Formal methodologies have been tested in the

past (eg. ANOVA, STOF) but they have yet to be adapted to the Living Lab’s needs. There is a need for a more

systematic methodology.

•  Health and social interventions (associations, clinics, …) in contact with the users

•  Researchers

Qualitative evaluations

Meeting Minutes (1 per project per year)

Governance

Issues

•  Working with vulnerable users; •  Managing the tension between users needs and

advancing the state of the art; •  Informing and educating the regional government to

the benefits of citizen involvement; and •  Addressing problems inherent in inter-disciplinary

working

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Working with vulnerable users

•  Ensure that the living lab: –  Interacts with vulnerable people in an equitable manner, –  Respecting their needs and wishes ethically, –  Adheres to relevant legislative provision in the field of ethics, –  All stakeholder organisations who are responsible for

managing adherence to ethical guidelines do so

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Managing the tension between users needs and advancing the state of the

art •  Balance of the management of innovation activities. •  Majority of activities funded with support from

European and national research and development grants.

•  The lab focuses on the early innovation stages: ideation, connection and evaluation;

•  degree of ‘user-driven-ness’ v. state-of-the-art advancement.

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Informing and educating the regional government to the benefits of citizen

involvement •  Managing the difficulty experienced in embedding the

living lab into the community in the North of Ireland •  The bedding down of the living lab into the community

is strategically important. •  Forming long-term linkages with local government and

related municipal organisations, against a backdrop of political uncertainty at both regional and local municipal levels.

•  There is also evidence in the Northern Ireland region, that there is a related issue arising from a pre-disposition against risk-taking and openness to fresh thinking in innovation. 20

Addressing problems inherent in inter-disciplinary working

•  Practical problems in fostering inter-disciplinary research between different areas of expertise, for example, computing and health sciences.

•  “Those whose work becomes more interdisciplinary feel that they are losing their peer group.” –  Linda Katehi, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

•  Such human factors were one of the main barriers to inter-disciplinarity.”

•  This has been experienced in our living lab as external pressure force academics into ‘discipline silos’.

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Concluding remarks…

•  Significant body of academic research that supports the premise that user-driven innovation creates value in markets and for society.

•  The network of living labs in Europe has been created, partly based upon this premise

•  But it can be argued that there is a lack of evidence that demonstrates how such living labs articulate their value proposition, and

•  How they carry out activities on the ground to work with users to create the added valued inherent in early innovation processes.

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Concluding remarks…

•  How to work across EU, national, regional and city/council level

•  How to provide (e-) services that reach people’s daily lives…

•  …using supporting philosophies like ‘libertarian paternalism’

•  Mayor of Stockholm: –  “If we combine ICT for Growth with Democratic goals, then

blend will be valuable” - Stockholm 2007

…THANKS