Living Labs Roadmap 2007-2010

BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVENESS

LIVING LABS ROADMAP 2007-2010

RECOMMENDATIONS ON NETWORKED SYSTEMS FOR OPEN USER-DRIVEN

RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND INNOVATION

QUALITY STATUS: OPEN DOCUMENT VERSION: FINAL

ON BEHALF OF THE LIVING LABS PORTFOLIO LEADERSHIP GROUP

ON BEHALF OF THE CORELABS PROJECT

To effectively target the Lisbon agenda, new holistic innovative and powerful innovation approaches are needed. The approach suggested in this document, is to build systems - Living Labs - which engage and empower large groups of citizens in open real-world experimentally driven innovation processes.

The increasing number of people and organisations behind this approach are fully convinced that the proposed way to empower users in open cross-border collaboration will become a very strong element in a new European innovation system. The networked system - the European Network of Living Labs – established and growing in size and maturity, is dedicated to generate, in large scale, significantly more competitive, valuable and sustainable products, services, content and societal infrastructures, based on advanced information and communication technology, ICT.

This document is targeted to become a shared definition, planning, coordination and marketing tool, to be used and jointly maintained by people and organisations engaged in building the networked system for sustainable European competitiveness – the European Network of Living Labs.

All members of the Living Labs Open Innovation Community are welcomed to, submit changes and amendments in order to make and keep this document as comprehensive and up-to-date as possible (see “Authors supplement” at the end of document).

Disclaimer: This paper reports the consolidated ideas of many committed individuals but does not prejudge the opinion of any single contributor or organisation.

LIVING LABS ROADMAP WORK GROUP

LIVING LABS ROADMAP 2007-2010 RECOMMENDATIONS ON

SYSTEMS FOR OPEN USER-DRIVEN RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND INNOVATION

STATUS: DRAFT SAVED: 2010-10-08 STATUS: OPEN DOCUMENT VERSION: FINAL

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SECT. CONTENT PAGE

1 BACKGROUND AND POTENTIAL 4 2 DEFINITIONS AND PRINCIPLES 9 2.1 What is a Living Lab? 9 2.2 Living Labs in industrial perspective 12 2.3 Six views on a Living Lab - The harmonization cube 14 2.4 Experience and Application Research - ISTAG report 20 3 LIVING LABS RESULTS AND NEEDS FOR THE FUTURE 21 3.1 European Innovation in the Context of Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Jobs 21 3.2 Service Creation 21 3.3 Governance 21 3.4 User Involvement 22 3.5 Innovation Outcomes 22 3.6 Network Synergies 22 3.7 Infrastructure 23 3.8 Methods & Tools 28 3.9 Interoperability in different Domains 30 4 ROADMAP ACTIONS AND MILESTONES 32 4.1 Today – Current status of Living Labs 32 4.2 Living Lab Maturity Phases 32 4.3 2007 second half - Portuguese Presidency - ENoLL 2nd wave launch 32 4.4 2008 first half - Slovenian Presidency - ENoLL 3rd wave 33 4.5 2008 second half - French Presidency - Completion of ENoLL launch 33 4.6 2009 first half - Czech Presidency 33 4.7 2009 second half - Swedish Presidency 33 4.8 2010 and beyond 33 5 COLLABORATION AND NETWORKING 34 5.1 The Living Labs Portfolio 34 5.2 From Regional Networks to Global Reach 36 6 STRATEGY AND RECOMMENDATIONS, INVESTMENTS AND BENEFITS 40 6.1 ICT Research and Technology Development (RTD) 40 6.2 Socio-economic research 44 6.3 Research infrastructure 49 6.4 Thematic networks for harmonisation 50 6.5 Application area specific approaches 53 6.6 Regional policy approaches 53 7 CONCLUSIONS 56 8 REFERENCES 57 8.1 Abbreviations and Terminology 57 8.2 Publications 58 8.3 Internet Places 59





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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

70-95% of private and public investments in research and development of ICT-based products and services fail to produce market valid value. One major type of deficiency observed is that traditional ICT R&D projects are initiated and executed in a closed and/or artificial laboratory environment with too limited and too late interaction with, and understanding of, the potential market and its users.

Facebook, Google Earth, Linux, Second Life and Wikipedia are all successful evidence that it is possible to establish Internet based systems/environments to enable engagement of large communities of users for joint creation of valuable assets (content, products, services etc).

Industrial bench-marks made, also indicate that large open user communities outperform very significant in-house industrial efforts, when it comes to produce high quality results over time.

Clearly, the most recognized systems for open collaborative innovation already instrument very powerful environments for creation of business valid assets. However, there are several ways to further develop and improve open user-driven innovation. When improved to empower innovation in real-world (not virtual) contexts and when based on broad private-public-person partnerships, PPPP (not single vendor) systems we call them Living Labs.

A European Network of Living Labs, ENoLL, has been established (Nov. 2006) and comprises (Nov. 2007) 52 Living Labs in eighteen of the twenty five European Union member states.

This roadmap is a plan of how to build, grow and mature this network in order to become a strong pillar in a new European innovation system and in particular to reinforce Europe’s capability to generate competitive products, services, content and societal infrastructure, based on advanced information and communication technology, ICT.

Recognizing the importance of human free spirit, inclusion and environmental friendliness for sustainability, this roadmap proposes principles for ENoLL development and maturity in terms of proposed R&D areas, policy priorities and federation principles.





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1 BACKGROUND AND POTENTIAL

70-95% (investigations vary) of private and public investments in research and development of ICT-based products and services fail to produce business valid results. One major type of deficiency observed is that traditional ICT R&D projects are initiated and executed in a closed and/or artificial laboratory environment with too limited and too late interaction with, and understanding of, the potential market and its users. Today this is virtually a paradox from the perspective that modern ICT provides powerful communication means for individuals (e.g. users) to engage, interact and collaborate in large groups over large physical distances and across organisational borders (we all use the same Internet).

The current ICT Work Programme is focused on strengthening the innovation capabilities in Europe by developing new information and communication technologies for the society. However there are also important developments in the ICT environment that stem not from new technologies but from a new understanding of Open Collaborative Architectures (OCA) which enable new forms of technology integration and specialisation to support horizontal collaboration in diverse areas where the innovative knowledge worker creates value through various ad-hoc and ambient networks for services. Developments in the Web X.0 area shows that although the technology has remained almost the same for Internet access (with only some minor incremental updates and penetration growth) the attitude of the user towards the medium has drastically changed. Web 2.0 is built on established Internet protocols and broadband access, but the networked innovations tend to be social in nature. Web 2.0 describes the new generation of Internet-based services that allow people to collaborate, share and manage information with unprecedented ease and scale. This could be turned into European advantage on a user and application level convergence through research focusing on deployable OCA and OSA addressing human centric wireless and mobility elements of European legacy.

This development is leading from a consumer-oriented approach to a wider co-creative approach where co-creators are facilitated with open source development tools and creative commons- type IPR sharing principles. Various vertical business sectors have expressed strong interest to create Open Services Architectures (OSA) in order to develop Service Integration with open standard architecture principles. This creates convergence in the service sector and provides process efficiencies. This European level convergence would enable seamless interoperability not only between industries but also between the public and private sectors, which constitute the biggest share of service creation in Europe (Media, Health sector, Transportation, Education and training, e-government services, etc).

A number of the major industrial players and organizations in Europe are creating a Large Technology Platforms and JTIs, which will serve as the focus point for future European actions to exploit the innovation sources of virtual collaborative innovation in innovation networks such as Living Labs. Important members of the Initiative include such companies as Atos Origin, IBM, Nokia, SAP, Telefonica, Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens Network, Mobile Research Center Bremen, Luleå Technology community, Waterford Institute of Technology, Bregenz technology community, Barcelona Technology community, Munich and Leiden University centric clusters and the European Space Agency to mention few(inclusive list of the 51 members of the LLs in ENoLL).

We, the members of this Living Lab initiative, would call for special attention to be paid for these cross technology and cross business collaborative horizontal research needs that are identified from the 7th Framework Programme.





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The above mentioned approach to Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) and the consequent developments have already started during the 6th Framework Programme and notably, from its 5th call, the context of emerging new working environments are being discussed in the ongoing approved projects. In particular, projects such as Network4Value emphasised in its conclusions the needs to establish a wide economic and regulatory initiative of Open European Collaborative Space (OECS) to emphasise in Public Private Partnerships the potential for European level collaborative services creation by 2013.

The need for a network of large scale demonstrators (read LivingLabs*) to be established for quicker market scale up has been emphasised in various workshops and conferences supported by specific CWE projects. The project CoreLabs has focused on the establishment of ENoLL (European Network of LivingLabs) which was launched during the Finnish Presidency as a Prime Minister’s initiative to support the European Innovation system. Five large Integrated Projects from the 6th Framework Programme are demonstrating various innovations in new working environments for work place efficiency and creativity. Horizontal instruments such as the OCA Group, headed by Telefonica together with other key European industries, are defining those Living Lab reference architectures. The project Clock is preparing the ground for developing an upper level service integration layer, closer to the user applications, which will support European Industry efforts to excel in mechanisms for extracting value from global R&D Innovations. The Bainbridge’s project is looking to regional innovations processes as a source for Collaborative Working Environments, especially in the area of Public-Private Partnerships and other new mechanisms to fund innovations in a scalable way with the support of Hampton Court/Aho Report (following its recommendations for European Innovation system). The Laboranova integrated project is changing existing technological and social infrastructures for collaboration and support knowledge workers in sharing, improving, and evaluating ideas systematically across teams, companies, networks and Living Labs.

All these new technological capabilities converge broadly at Workplace (Dynamic Workplace, Collaborative Workplace or Ubiq Workplace). This is where the Knowledge Worker of 21st century is enabled to perform the knowledge work in a productive way. Given the increasing need to mobilize the “collective intelligence and creativity” collaborative technologies will be vital – not only for the individual knowledge worker but for business and the society at large.

This is a classical area of “application-led research” as postulated by ISTAG Paper “Orientation for Work Programme in FP 7” in June 2006. It needs a high degree of interdisciplinary (technology, engineering and social sciences) as well as new approaches to drive the research and innovation process. The ISTAG document is referring to “Innovation Communities” – a concept tightly connected to the Living Labs – where the Finnish Presidency has taken the sponsorship to launch a European Network to foster and enhance innovation in Europe and which is followed by the German presidency, further expanded through the Portuguese presidency and work under way for the Slovenian and French presidencies.

Unfortunately the first part of the ICT Work Programme did not reflect this need for collaborative horizontal elements. The Coordinated Action Clock has been able to successfully position this discussion in the i2010 working group together with the Industry Advisory Group for the Service Innovation area (Nokia, IBM, SAP, Atos Origin, etc.).





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Global trend towards open innovation

The emergence of the shift of more intelligence from the core towards the edges is clearly depicted from the strong new bottom-up business creating new rules for internet and influence on the network architectures, IPR, regulation requirements and global market forces.

This is seen in centralized digital media broadcasting moving quickly towards IP-TV and JOOST-Type of new services and users and user communities becoming producers of new contents and media service integrators becoming new channels for distribution.

Telephony moving to new IP-based services and even advertisement funded service such as SKYPE and others .

E-Collaboration has also transformed itself to SKYPE, JOOST and GMAIL-type of services where add-hoc and virtual capacities of the network is utilized and business models are meshed with other platform service products.

The web itself has been created into a mega mesh network where new innovation can be nurtured in many local applications and in different closed & open and ad-hoc networks. Kazaa and global collaborative platforms such as 2ndlife, Facebook and other self organizing communities bring quickly new global business logics.

This all creates an opportunity and demands on intelligent terminal development for ever ‘thicker’ client development to fulfil this emergence of intelligence moving to edges and even peripheries. Moving to personalized mobile x.0 service is not anymore a dream but reality and mass-service customization is needed for huge potential global market. For realizing the potential of large numbers of developers in mobile communities a true Personal AMP has to be created. Mobile web-servers supplying APACHE&PYTHON for mobile web service creation. Software solution technologies such as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) enabled to mobile terminals will increase this potential.

Growing industrial need for user-driven innovation and livinglabbing

In an array of industries, producer centred innovation is being eclipsed by user-driven innovation – the idea generation, concept development, prototyping, and even production of new products and services is done by users/consumers. These users aren’t just voicing their needs to companies that are willing to listen; they’re inventing and often building what they want.

Breakthrough medical-equipment innovations such as the heart-lung machine and the first automated drug pumps were developed by doctors at the leading edge of practice, not by firms that manufacture medical equipment. Novel food categories like sports energy drinks and gels were developed by sports enthusiasts.

ICT enabled service development is benefiting extensively of user-driven innovation. Excellent examples of that are for example that the most usable and stable Nokia 770 and Lego Mindstorm applications are developed by user-developer communities.

This process of users’ coming up with products and services is increasingly well documented, but only few companies are actively trying to take advantage of it. The majority of companies do not yet exploit these possibilities and these new innovation platforms - Living Labs - are still “under-used”.





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Industries understanding the benefits of Living Labs

The concept of Living Lab is relevant to the necessities of evaluating e.g. the mass deployment potential of ICT enabled solutions. Living Labs represent regional innovation environments focusing on user communities embedded within “real life”. Besides technological aspects Living Labs allow insight on to the human dimension of technology, which is of paramount importance for a successful societal deployment of new technologies.

As a consequence of this potential, the Living Lab approach is considered as the natural candidate especially for the implementation of large scale evaluation, demonstration and validation activities related to ICT based products and services. From a market and industry creation perspective Living Labs offer a research and innovation platform which can help industries to apply user-driven innovation practices. Living labs can enhance economical, social and cultural systems cross-regionally and cross-nationally.

From the industry perspective there is still a need for clarifying the livinglabbing field of activities and a necessity to support industry to start and adopt new user-driven innovation practices. Industry wants to know how to take advantage of these new user-driven innovation and livinglabbing opportunities in their innovation processes. The demonstration of what LivingLabs is and what and how it could be used by industry and public sector in their user-driven innovation process must be seen as the major outcome of this project.

Earlier user- involvement

Growth of testing is valuable, but there is a common need to involve users earlier, before testing starts, in order to support the early phase of innovation. This will ultimately decrease innovation costs and increase income. That happens because of higher hit ratio and spending less on developing bad ideas, and earning more because of getting better ideas.

Combination of these two starting points will be of great value for the business sector. Within ENoLL the Nordic tradition of early user-driven involvement is an asset and an advantage that should be developed into a method for user driven-innovation i.e. livinglabbing.

When mature, a Living Lab has to provide services or instrument assets which add values both in industry (business relevance) and academy (research). In order to become sustainable successful, a Living Lab has to establish a valid "business model", including feasible means to get necessary (financial) resources.

Networked environment

The new ways of developing new products and services calls for a change from a technocratic paradigm of technical change to a broader system design that reinforces networked environment and, simultaneously, fosters societal developments. The reason why knowledge-based activities, such as Living Labs, are particularly prone to foster and sustain networked environments and societal developments is because they will increasingly rely on “distributed knowledge bases”, as a systematically coherent set of knowledge, maintained across an economically and/or socially integrated set of agents and institutions.





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At the European Network of Living Labs level they globally provide critical mass and social context for the development, testing and dissemination of innovative user-driven/citizen services and products. The network effect (i.e. Metcalfe's Law) increases benefits exponentially for the whole when new nodes are linked. Cross fertilization, serendipity and synchronicity compound with other network externalities and may increase the emergence of innovations. The European Network of Living Labs responds to local and regional challenges and opportunities to address global markets and enable collective learning at a European Level. Further, the network of Living Labs will help to bridge the digital divide by increasing the absorption capacity of local communities and foster territorial appropriation of information and communication technologies (ICT) by enterprises, not-for-profit organizations and local or regional governments.

Potential

Potential is within reach to make European R&D more business valid. However, to achieve this, advanced R&D is needed to form and integrate suitable methods, ICT and multi-media solutions, which empowers, at scale, individual users to engage in product and service development in users real life/work contexts, urban as well as rural, and through open environments and processes to avoid prejudiced assumptions about who will be the “typical users” of a certain product or service. Obviously the role of users in Innovation is increasingly recognized, especially after the seminal work of von Hippel [17].

To be carefully considered:

What will be a success on the market is still elusive and probably because of the increase in complexity in some sectors (technological development can also reduce complexity) failures are still more common than successes even in the presence of market validation exercises as pilots or test markets with a heavy user involvement. Still many of the products that are a success have not been co-developed at all and are the product of small groups (Apple and Google products for example…) that introduce the product into the market in a fairly high state of development in order to reduce third party appropriability.

We may direct our attention to what has changed in Innovation with a few main vectors: • The increasing value of experimentation in large users groups (March, 2006, Thomke,

…) • Open Innovation and the need to user a market approach for innovation • User involvement in different ways and forms depending on the product and especially

true in product platforms and • The need for societal involvement in Innovation in this new scenario. This probably is

more in line to the understanding of Funding agencies than a higher bet on co-development (true in some sectors like open source but completely absent in many others).

See also the comprehensive “Aho-group report” [01] on how to reinforce EU research and innovation performance.





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2 DEFINITIONS AND PRINCIPLES

2.1 What is a Living Lab?

A Living Lab is a system enabling people, users/buyers of services and products, to take active roles as contributors and co-creators in the research, development and innovation process.

A Living Lab has one main role, and this is to engage and empower users to participate in the generation of valuable and sustainable assets towards objectives set-up by its partners and customers.

Primarily, a Living Lab should have capability to; • Form an appropriate organisation and partnership • Motivate and empower large scale user engagement • Establish adequate tools and infrastructure • Form and execute case-dependent processes and manage IPR • Disseminate a wide variety of results

As of today (2007/2008), even the most advanced Living Labs are rather immature. There is a significant need for R&D to gain knowledge how to manage the Living Labs and the significant complexity and flexibility which is inherent to innovation in general and with engaging users (which can not be easily controlled) in particular.

Living Labs have started to exchange experiences and best practises such as within the European Network of Living Lab, www.openlivinglabs.eu. However, very little operational and practical collaboration has been established so far. Obvious and expected synergies and expected values with a Living Lab network are of course the opportunities from sharing knowledge and resources. Other very important synergies from operating as a network, (with extensions into different markets and cultures) are to be able to engage a larger and more diversified community of users and the opportunity to understand similarities and differences between users and customers in different marketplaces.

It is already clearly recognised that these fundamental network efficiencies in particular attractive to global industry. Hence, when these network capabilities are in place and an appropriate inter-network business model is agreed, it will contribute significantly to the sustainability of the individual Living Labs being contributors to the network efficiency.

Living Labs provide contextualized experimentation grounds where predefinition of technology stacks are avoided. Instead RTD is use case driven addressing real life problems. The solving responses of technological solutions can be used immediately as reference implementations for roll-out purposes. The normal set up currently makes it necessary to acquire a reference customer when the first release of a new product is launched (ramp up phase). This cause a delay in future market penetration as many of the new customers ask for reference implementations before they buy in. Such a reference implementation comes for free as the development is embedded in the real life Living Lab.





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Another aspect of business software solution roll out is the training and education of masses of end users for new products. The introduction of new services and products requires a scalable and target group oriented set up efficiently transferring the know how on how to implement, customize, maintain and use the software and technologies. The training material in use should address the most important aspects based on derived obstacles that end users experience when using the solutions. Living Labs avoid the wrong design of training and education material through its close end user engagement. The development of documentation is another example where close end user engagement provides measurable added value.

Experimentation on specific topics gain certain benefits and efficiencies from a “Rotating view” [2] of different stakeholders, e.g. on standardization topics. The different perspectives of various role players will enable RTD staff to develop a holistic solution comprising the input from various research disciplines. This of course requires an interdisciplinary research consortium.

In certain research areas a multi-stakeholder partnerships are simply a must. Recent technology trends include the internet of services. It implies to deliver integrated services with fragmented service providers in the background (e.g. in the case of travel bookings). End users will not recognize anymore with how many and with whom they actually interact but will only be confronted with an integrated service package. To allow smooth delivery of such a package open standards, open innovation and flexible consortia are essential. Certainly Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) management will become also more important in such an environment.

IPR management generally needs to be adapted. Currently this is a tricky issue. Certain commercial interests need to be respected to allow for industry leaders to participate and one has to carefully deal with joint intellectual property between LL partners.

2.1.1 KEY PRINCIPLES FOR LIVING LAB OPERATIONS (“CORES”)

The general mission of a Living Lab, and of ENoLL, is to be a supreme environment for innovation of market valid ICT based products, services, contents and societal infrastructures. Its most important role is to facilitate innovation based on large scale collaboration between users and business stakeholders.

The principles of Living Lab operations are Continuity, Openness, Realism, Empowerment of users and Spontaneity, CORES:

Continuity – Creativity is strengthened by a multitude of views originating from broad experience and cross-border collaboration. Experiences are gained and views are broadened over time. Good cross-border collaboration is built on trust and building trust between people from different backgrounds and work/life cultures take time. Business opportunities can only be finally validated through real market experiments. Capability to plan and run such experiments is built on practical experience, carried by people working, in continuity over time, in the Living Lab environment. Users and partners build trust and context unique knowledge over series projects, innovation cases and business experiments.

Openness – The innovation processes must be as open as possible. This is essential for gathering of many perspectives and to bring enough power to achieve rapid progress. Further, since innovation is about new ways/things generating values for its users/customers, it is inherently difficulty foresee all potential beneficiaries. There are numerous examples where a particular product concept was anticipated to have a certain usage scenario and market but when openly introduced to the market, the strongest pick-up was from unexpected category of users for an unexpected type of usage.





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Realism - Realistic behaviour of users and stake-holders is necessary in order to generate results which are valid for real (realistic) markets. A Living Lab must be experienced by its users and stake-holders as a “natural environment” – today or in the near future. The focus on innovation in real-life/work environment is also key factor which differentiates Living Labs mode of operations from many other types of open environments for co-creation (such as Google Earth, Second Life etc)

Empowerment of users (see definition of “users” in section 8) – The engagement of users is fundamental in order to bring innovation process in a direction, based on user needs and desires. However, in order to get the full effect from users engagement it is not sufficient to use them as “guinea pigs“ for testing. Living Labs efficiency is based on the creative power of significant user communities and the most important enabler of user power is obviously to empower and motivate users to engage – not only in one project or case but in continuity over time. Experience show users having wide experience from various innovation processes are more effective as innovators.

Spontaneity - In order to succeed with new products and services, it is not enough to offer more and better professional/serious functionality, but also ones that inspire usage, meet personal desires and fit and contribute to social and societal needs. This make innovations meeting this complexity of needs and desires, it is not enough to explore and address users early outspoken needs in a initially context, assumed to be the most important. It is also very important to have the ability to detect, aggregate and analyze spontaneous user’s reactions and ideas over time, along a product/service full lifecycle. This means that Living Labs methods and tools must enable innovation in continuity, not only innovations at events, in single projects or campaigns. Note again that this need applies not only to end users, but to all kinds of users in all relevant roles/organisations along the product/service value-chain ( “users” definition in section 8).

2.1.2 LIVING LAB TYPES

Though all Living Labs have a main role to facilitate user engagement in innovation, Living Labs appear and emerge in great variation. Some Living Labs have geographical or demographic focus like rural or urban areas or young or elderly people. Other Living Labs are closely connected to a branch or industrial value chain such as healthcare or “automotive”. Yet another category focuses on a particular type of person-centric contexts such as “being mobile” or “daily private life”. Analysis of existing and emerging Living Labs is in progress as is debate whether there is a need for, and a feasible way to, divide or map Living Labs into different categories and how such a “classification or categorization scheme” should look like.





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2.2 Living Labs in industrial perspective

LL IN INDUSTRIAL PERSPECTIVE - SAP

SAP’s strategy in particular in the SME (Small and Mid-size Enterprise) market includes the ambitious goal to grow the current customer base of more than 43.000 to about 100.000 by 2010. Such objectives can only be achieved in a strong partner network that allows for collaborative innovation. Currently more than 3850 official partners cooperate with SAP. The concept SAP is following on the software engineering of future products is based on a collaborative network of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that provide add-on functionality on a service oriented Business Process Platform. It is a simple fact that no single vendor can provide all of the innovation or the entire solution portfolio required by a company to run its business. Nor can a single vendor meet these needs as quickly as companies demand today. Success requires an ecosystem approach that puts the customer and its end users at the center and leverages the expertise of a network of vendors – and promotes a new level of collaboration between them for accelerated innovation and delivery of end-to-end solutions.

The huge diversity of end users is reflected in the variety and complexity of today’s business software solution portfolio. Cultural and regional related requirements, legislation on country level or industry specific vertical needs lead to a whole set of different solutions. To develop such solutions a detailed and precise understanding of local end-user needs is most important. Considering for instance human computer interaction it is questionable whether it is possible to follow a unified User Interface strategy for all kinds of business software. Instead one can think of ways to rather apply unified methodologies which could be derived from action research in Living Labs that extracts e.g. best practices of end user interaction. Such standardized and proven methodologies could lead to more efficiency.

Living Labs are environments that could offer easy access to an ecosystem of driving industry partners and end user communities going beyond the current possibilities. The networking aspect of bringing together the right partners with the required skills and expertise with motivated end users that are ready for driving change is of big importance for the ultimate success of future product and service delivery. End users that are part of a LL community are committed to experimentation, open for change and innovation. Often today’s daily business is characterized by a certain resistance on customer and end user side to adopt newest technologies, to reengineer business processes etc.

The mission of SAP’s participation in publicly funded research projects includes investigation into new markets either arising from incremental product and service development that is supplementing existing solutions in established regions and industries or that are originating from trends that are not related to existing solutions. In any case established global players in industry are under pressure to grow their business on a global scale with localized solutions.

Experience:

The Living Labs are mega testing grounds, involving huge swaths of target audiences. For example, an eGovernment project will be trialled within a whole community with all the necessary technologies, products and services. This provides for a stable environment and a trusted end-user community over a long period.





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In practice, SAP Research is thus able to explore and understand business and technology related pain points from end to end in potential future and already established markets. This in itself helps SAP Research to achieve higher relevance for its research undertakings and to explore new market conditions at an earliest stage. Additional benefit is the maximum closeness to real environments, actually the immersion in the real world.

SAP Research centres in Germany, Switzerland and the Republic of South Africa are pioneering the Living Labs concepts within SAP. Their activities focus on such important areas as manufacturing and retail. What they have in common is the motivation to work as closely as possible to the real world, with real customers in real settings. Thus SAP Research shortens the way from the prototype to the actual next-generation software product. Ref [10].

LL IN INDUSTRIAL PERSPECTIVE - NOKIA

Nokia has a strategy to focus in different levels to open collaborative innovation with external organizations and innovative individuals.

First level: Nokia Beta Labs are engaging Nokia users into co-creation of new services and experiences. It provides a public portal for software and services prior to commercialisation of new products and services. It provides open architectures and open source tools to external developers and brings direct virtual feedback to innovation communities and Nokia R&D Units. It functions globally. It provides value for users: early access, opportunity to contribute and value for Nokia: early market feedback, fail fast, scale fast.

Second levels: Nokia Lab Lets and internal Alfa- and Beta Labs.

Nokia Lab Lets are physical open labs residing currently in six University campuses. These Labs concentrate into specific innovation areas of those University Core Competencies and objectives is to nurture open innovation with best academics in research. Nokia Alfa and Beta Labs are labs to link new Innovations to business strategies and create a process to open these new Innovations for targeted collaboration with external partners and user communities. This work is addressing both user centric designs and close to market ecosystems.

Third level: Living Labs

Living labs are for open user driven innovation validation and development environments, which are managed by external and in many cases by public-private consortiums to create market like conditions to test also emergent markets for new services and products. Nokia is not directly investing into them but creates strategic alliances with them and acts as a client for their services. Such Living Labs close to Nokia are at the MIT, Boston/Cambridge Campus, Selected ENoLL sites, Village LivingLabs in developing countries and in Mega cities of China.

Example:

For realizing the potential of large numbers of developers in mobile communities a true Personal AMP has to be created. Mobile web-servers supplying APACHE&PYTHON for mobile web service creation. Software solution technologies such as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) enabled to mobile terminals will increase this potential.





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Individual Living Labs can be environments for this development but enabling Living Lab Networks to function concurrently can Europe match the challenges of other global regions dominating in virtual collaborative open innovation. Living lab network has taken such domain specific R&D challenges to its players as Ambient Assisted living for ICT enhanced services for aging population, Mobile Smart Home platforms for energy efficiency by citizens, Radio and satellite technologies to renew urban public transportation challenges, Mobile interactive TV for citizen centric consumer models, personalized life management services and related functional service architectures etc

Experience:

Nokia has been actively working on LivingLabs since 2001 when it started developing its own open innovation work space at Karaportti Finland (first Corporate Living Lab). Between 2003 towards today Nokia has participated in several Living Lab related research projects that come close to user driven innovation areas. Such projects are Mobilife (IP coordinated by Nokia), Intelcities (IP between Cities on e-gov.), Mosaic, C&R, Clock, BrainBridges, Laboranova, Tell-Me, CoreLabs and several EU funded studies. Besides this several national and Nordic LL projects are underway currently. Nokia also hosts and participates in several international, European (ENoLL Chair), Nordic and national Living Lab Consortiums or Associations (Chair in DIMES/LITE-OPEN). After the split of Nokia and Nokia-Siemens-Networks, NSN, NSN has created its independent strategy towards Living Labs. Nokia and NSN continue in collaboration of Living Lab R&D.

2.3 Six views on a Living Lab - The harmonization cube

In order to define a shared reference towards a harmonization of methods and tools for use in a European Network of Living Labs an interoperability cube for harmonizing Living Labs has been developed (Mulder, Fahy, Hribernik, Velthausz, Feuerstein, et al., 2007). The interoperability cube (Figure 01) builds on the assumption that the focus on synergies and those elements that Living Labs want to exchange with each other forms an appropriate basis for the harmonization of methods and tools. The cube identifies these exchange possibilities and explicitly defines interoperability elements from organizational, technical and contextual perspectives in which different standards are relevant.

Figure 01 Living Labs Harmonization Cube





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The process of setting up refers to the hardest work in setting up and running a Living Lab. Sustainability comes after this, when a Living Lab is kept operational and becomes permanent, or put differently: self-sustainable. A next step could be that all practices are scalable, useful in other contexts, more extended etc. As said before, it is obvious that not all components of the standardization framework need necessarily be interoperable from organizational, technical or contextual points of view. Evaluations within Living Labs are usually done in a real world context and this includes some complications such as the contexts influence on the evaluation results. Standardization is imperative in order to support seamless collaboration in each of these dimensions. The more elements that match, the better Living Labs are harmonised. Best practices, lessons learned and other topics that were wishful to be exchanged could be clustered in the following topics: user involvement, service creation, infrastructure, governance, innovation outcomes, and methods & tools. Besides dealing with harmonization of methods and tools, the cube can be used as a way to structure and access the repository and other online resources resulting from the CoreLabs project. For that reason, we propose the topics included on the sides of the cube to be focus of ENoLL and the open innovation community. Maybe even a reason for a Living Lab to become part of ENoLL or member of the Open Innovation Community. The six sides of the cubes are described below.

USER INVOLVEMENT

User involvement is one of the key elements of a Living Lab, and as such should be a focal point of mature Living Labs. In creating usable systems it is generally accepted that they should be designed according to an iterative approach, and that user involvement is crucial, see e.g., Mulder (2004). The focus is on finding out what the relevant experiences, methods, tools that Living Labs benefit from are. Users are important to define context-aware services, think for example of cultural differences. Organisational issues include questions like How to organize user involvement? How to find the right users? What about the validity? How to motivate the users? From a technological point of view: How to get access to large user groups? How to analyse large amounts of data? In order to enable scalability, the use of grid technology can be seen as a possible solution, as the volume of data generated within the Living Lab could become extremely large. Analysing social context data, application usage data and user experience data collected in real-life settings presents new challenges - it’s not clear a priori which data is relevant. Therefore, new analysis and reporting modules might be needed along with scalable, flexible storage and computing resources to cope with large amount.

Targeting very large user communities has some significant implications as listed in the table below:

Table 01: Implications from targeting very large user communities.

Layer of Analysis From To Implications and requirements

Conspicuous objects

Invisible infrastructure

Embedding ICT infrastructures in urban daily life, fostering human-centered systems

Infrastructure/access Fixed access Roaming Competitive mobile services

and improved regulatory framework for increased





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individual participation

One-way distribution of information

On-line collaboration and participation

Specific knowledge of institutional and local contexts in order to help developing interactive contents

Content/ services Web functionalities

Networked Activities

New competences in content and services development, enhancing user activities and networks

Technology supply

Mobilization of users

Mobilizing “change agents” to foster communities of practice (CoP) and user involvement

Human and social Context Standards Inter-

operability Building individual and social competences through knowledge-based adaptive human centred environments

SERVICE CREATION

Service creation with relevance to the Living Labs describes the value added components that Living Labs can bring to innovation and validation. ‘Value-added’ implies we are ‘bringing something new and needed to the table’. Historically, the development of Living Labs has been stimulated by the cross-regional need to improve innovation and competitiveness. Service creation within ENoLL should have pan-European relevance as opposed to that national or regional relevance. The resultant objectives of such an environment provide us with three underlying categories of required services (Ballon, Pierson, & Delaere, 2005): services supporting collaborative innovation, services supporting validation and demonstration, and services specific to stakeholder requirements. On a more operational level of Living Labs and ENoLL, three types of horizontal services structure the service matrix (Ballon et al, 2005): technical services – communication, collaboration, demonstration, prototyping, validation, product deployment etc., customer services – innovation, idea generation, community services, training, specific service needs, business support, market customisation, and thirdly, intra-network services (within ENoLL) – governance, management, training.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Within this context, a simple definition of infrastructure can be given as the basic facilities, services, and installations, or underlying framework or features required for the operation of a Living Lab. In order to harmonise the infrastructures used and/or developed in the different Living Labs, infrastructures can be categorised by their use during the entire life cycle of the Living Lab.

The first set of criteria determines which infrastructures are chosen to be used at the establishment of the Living Lab. Infrastructures will be chosen depending on the environment in which the Living Lab is to be deployed and the objectives which are to be achieved. The second category includes criteria defining which infrastructures are candidates to achieve the Living Labs’ self-sustainability.





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The key ones in each Living Lab will be shared within the network. The third set of criteria will determine infrastructures are more apt to evolve and adapt than others. These are the ones that will be considered with a higher level of scalability. Central to this categorisation is to describe the ‘evolution’ performed in the different infrastructures used in the establishment of the Living Lab in order to achieve sustainability or in order to be scalable.

This means that the most important added value to be detailed in the scalability and sustainability phases is the transformation or improvement of the infrastructures established in the first phase (setup). The cross-cutting categorisation is made in terms of the use of infrastructure. The aim is to describe the use of infrastructures in each of the three phases of life of a Living Lab, from three different perspectives.

The organisational perspective describes the infrastructures used in each Living Lab with the purpose of supporting the organisation of the Living Lab. The contextual perspective describes the infrastructures used in each Living Lab in the context of the Living Lab. Finally, the technological perspective describes the infrastructures used in each Living Lab as the technology backbone of the Living Lab.

Some Living Lab infrastructures might be considered in the three perspectives defined, however it is foreseen that some others may be dedicated to a subset. Again, it is not so important to mention the infrastructure used, but the real added value is mentioning the different important aspects of the use of each infrastructure in these perspectives.

GOVERNANCE

The governance structure of a Living Lab describes the way it is organised and managed at different levels such as the operational or strategic ones. These (organisational, contextual or technological) aspects are related to the life cycle of the Living Lab. The strategic level deals with issues like: the way Intellectual Property Rights and exploitation of results are dealt with; the way stakeholders are involved (financial contributions, commitment, responsibility, influence), financing: public-private-partnership, commercial; ownership of the Living Lab, i.e. its services, infrastructure, and the responsible entity for Living Lab (dedicated organisation or consortium); the management structure, e.g. director, steering board, (technical) program committee, user committee; driver and nature of the Living Lab, e.g. community-driven, research driven, business/industry driven, technology driven, open/closeness: sharing resources/network; Living Lab development: consortium dynamics (e.g. additional partners, user groups), subsidy/funding policy and the definition and adjustment of the agenda. The operational level includes aspects like: working practices for the day to day management; execution & monitoring of the living lab goals regarding the synergy, quality and progress monitoring, internal communication; the way new software and services are introduced and validated, responsibilities and liabilities; the definition of user group/ awareness of being part of Living Lab; dissemination and external communication: national and international consolidation; the way projects are organized and funded.

INNOVATION OUTCOMES

Per Eriksson, Director at the Swedish Agency for Innovation systems stated ‘research is making knowledge out of money – innovation is making money out of knowledge.’ This implies a relation between research and innovation. The problem is that the processes of research and innovation don’t simply appear automatically.





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Current research presents a view of a sociological perspective of innovation and a change from a linear process — from research to innovation — to a user centric approach where technological research and sociological aspects are equally addressed. Innovation is the process by which new ideas are put into practice and can be seen as a learning/knowledge process within a community. Independent of innovation type, a Living Lab needs to be set up from an organisational point of view to guarantee specific Innovation Outcomes.

One of the major factors is the involvement of qualified personnel to guide and assist the innovation process. Additionally, the Living Lab should be able to involve all necessary stakeholders in the innovation chain, specifically in the area of user centricity and user knowledge. As such institutions are scarce [1] this can be identified as a primary focus of ENoLL synergy.

From a contextual point of view, considerations regarding Living Labs’ strategic market position need to be taken into account. This can be guided by the consideration which is the target market for innovation outcomes – examples are creating value for industry, specific industry sectors, SMEs, society, etc. The degree of flexibility the Living Lab can handle with regards to these target markets also signify its scalability in this area. Here, synergies can be created utilising the ENoLL network effect to expand or focus innovation contextuality. Technological systems, mainly ICT, need to be set up to facilitate the innovation processes. These necessarily support interaction and communication which empower creativity. These technologies can range from simple conferencing tools via telepresence to virtual, game-like environments. Virtual marketplaces can be employed for example for the brokerage of ideas and patents. Organisationally speaking, a suitable approach to IPR must be adopted to guarantee the financial sustainability of the Living Lab’s innovation outcomes. The outcome, a successful innovation, depends on the input given in the beginning of the innovation process, the idea. This early phase of innovation processes is also called Ideation. Ideation is the process of forming and relating ideas. It is described to be the process of discovering what to make, for whom, understand why to make it and define the success attributes including the development of insights for answering these strategic questions [4]. This definition shows the relevance of the early-stage of the innovation process for the product. The knowledge regarding the product and its features/definitions may be limited in the early phase but the product definition is strongly influenced in this period. During this phase it is easy and inexpensive to change the product and product features meanwhile it gets more expensive the later changes — during the phase of development and production — are done. From a contextual point of view, an optimal degree of interaction is necessary for the Living Lab to sustainably produce innovations [1]. This also extends to the technologies employed to facilitate such interaction.

METHODS AND TOOLS

The CoreLabs project has investigated methods and tools for Living Labs and established a respective taxonomy. The current Living Labs are using a diversity of technologies, infrastructures and applications and some host specialist technology providers and research institutes. Best Practices have been analyzed in order to ensure interoperability by either defining the use of de-facto standards or suggesting extensions to existing ones where applicable. The methods & tools category within the interoperability cube describes different methods and tools used within the existing European Living Lab at all stages.





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Integration of the project in the Living Lab infrastructure. A full Living Lab service offering not only requires product and service development and evaluation methodologies but also a mechanism for the integration of the customers’ product or service into a Living Lab to provide it to the users. The efficient, transparent and smooth integration accomplished by the Living Lab provider is the key for trust and convenience of the customer. It also can work as a first product/service testing depending on the level of development (market launch testing).

Co-creation. The core service of the Living Lab is to facilitate the co-creation of a product, service or application development. This co-creative product development process can be decomposed into four phases: Product Idea, Product Concept, Product Development, and Market Launch. The methods are divided into traditional market research methods and internet based methods allocated to the process phase they are most appropriate.

Data preparation. To fulfil the customers’ expectations regarding the results and to reduce the complexity of the evaluated data, the Living Lab provider offers a standardised data preparation. The great advantage of the standardisation is the comparability with the results within other Living Labs in the network and the confirmation of the expected output in the run-up to the usage of the Living Labs.

Figure 02 below shows how these all map into a harmonization cube. a first attempt to communicate the essentials of a Living Labs including applications. The Harmonization Cube illustrates synergies between Living Labs that can be exploited. The interoperability cube as well as the Corelabs taxonomy and repository for methods and tools enable the harmonization of methods and tools in the European Network of Living Labs, i.e., in multiple domains and across several living labs and hence facilitating a common ground for sharing.





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Figure 02 Six sides of the harmonization cube

2.4 Experience and Application Research - ISTAG report

One key to a living labs approach is what might broadly be termed user involvement in iterative development of new systems and also user-centred design. In addition, the ISTAG report (ref [08]) on Experience and Application Research (EAR) “Involving users in the development of ambient intelligence” defines stages for science and technology development (or centres), feasibility and usability testing (or centres), demonstration and evaluation testing (or centres) and field trials, in order to support the real involvement of real users in design, starting from the identification and incorporation of their needs within the development. The EAR approach, or at least what it indicates has been regarded as good practice in human factors and user-centred design for a number of years.





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3 LIVING LABS RESULTS AND NEEDS FOR THE FUTURE

3.1 European Innovation in the Context of Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Jobs

Results from workshop Brussels, 16 Oct 2007:

Topic:

What can stakeholders do to achieve a culture for user-driven open innovation, from a structural, social, policy perspective?

Prioritized results: • Establish a Living Lab Innovation Award • Involvement of different people generates different solutions • A common cooperation workspace for all stake-holders is important • We should not talk about stake holders, we should talk about individuals and their

communities • Social perspective: offer infrastructure and tools to young people (in schools) • We need models • Link to concrete sustainability goals • Structural perspective: investments in infrastructures • Invest in networks and clusters • Engineers should be educated so as to take into account users in their work (sociology,

user centred design etc)

3.2 Service Creation

Results from workshop - Brussels, 16 Oct 2007:

Topic:

The most urgently needed services for SMEs & Public Sector and indicate for each service how ENoLL can stimulate development.

Results prioritized: • Access to expertise • Tools to build and maintain networks • Collaborative tools • Publish on Living Lab website opportunities for SMEs to participate in EU pilots • Get an ambassador for ENoLL at European level

3.3 Governance

Results from workshop - Brussels, 16 Oct 2007:

Topic:

What type of governance body will ensure financial sustainability, participation and effectiveness in decision making?





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Results prioritized: • Cohesion model: network agreement between participants for funding • Fee based association of ENOLL • Participation should be open for both individual Living Labs and groups of Living Labs • A newly funded ENoLL Association financed from membership fees offering networking

services & platforms • Participant’s contributions

3.4 User Involvement

Introduction

An interesting point is made in “Wikinomics” by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams when talking about the sustainability of systems established to support co-creation and co-ownership: “One could envision a “digital-age co-op” with peer-rating systems that dynamically apportion shares to contributors based on the community’s assessment of the value added by individual contributors. Annual profits from sales and services could then be distributed across the community of contributors. Whatever the precise arrangement, it’s clear that the future of peer production lies in hybrid models where participants share and appropriate at the same time”. ref. [08] page 283

Workshop questions: • How to drive from User Involvement to User engagement? (From users as passive objects

to become users as designers, creators, and producers and even to become micro entrepreneurs?)

• What are the challenges of user involvement? (Over exploitation, feedback mechanisms, high failure rates etc?)

• How to improve user sampling and representative ness? (From face validity to content validity and process validity?)

3.5 Innovation Outcomes

Workshop questions: • IPR questions and levels of openness? • What are the living lab service outcomes in relation to paying customers? • Which internal processes are critical for high customer satisfaction?

3.6 Network Synergies

Workshop questions: • What are the key User community management issues? (cross sites, cross country, cross

border virtually, cross Europe/globally) • Which kind of Public-Private-Citizens partnership models are tested in Living Labs?

(Roles of different PPC actors like: universities, SMEs, public, citizens etc.)? • How to collaboratively enhance market creation within ENoLL community? How to

support innovation service provider (SMEs etc.) networking in Europe?





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3.7 Infrastructure

Introduction

There is a broad consensus about the significance of broadband penetration for inclusive development and territorial competitiveness. There is also growing evidence of the economic benefits of broadband deployment, namely on employment, the number of businesses overall, and businesses in IT-intensive sectors. OAN may respond to this challenge as an general purpose infrastructure and a open and neutral communication media fostering a whole new range of innovative services for the Living Labs.

Related to Living Labs, infrastructure issues can be divided in several different categories, depending on the different “roles” that the infrastructure may have: • Infrastructure being created as a result of Living Lab processes.

This means infrastructure in the role of being the target for user-driven creation, such as specifically targeted urban/rural living/societal areas (of buildings, roads, green-areas etc) (example Helsinki/Arabienranta LL), the “Intelligent Road” of infrastructures supporting inter-vehicle communication (example OAN, Botnia LL) and the community owned wireless mesh network (Homokhat Rural Living Lab/Hungary).

• Infrastructure supporting Living Lab cross-border collaboration, tools and methods. This means infrastructure in the role to enable the digital communication needed to appropriately support Living Lab tools and methods based on cross-border communication with/between groups of distributed users and other Living Lab stake-holders.

• Infrastructure for networking and collaboration between several Living Labs. Infrastructure in the role of enabling several Living Labs to exchange information and operate together, with purpose to offer more competitive and advanced services for user-driven research, development and innovation.

When considering these categories and when looking for the elements that make up a successful Living Lab, it is fair to acknowledge that its solution is not a purely technical one. Indeed, the concept of harmonising and networking Living Labs can be interpreted on four levels– people, organisation, application and infrastructure:

• People - Professional network of Living Labs experts • Organisation - Organisational and contractual structures implemented, set of

common methodologies employed • Applications/Collaborative - Common collaborative architecture supporting co-

creation processes (integrating all stakeholders) • Infrastructure - Harmonised test bed and network infrastructure

For the purpose of this section only the enabling levels of applications and infrastructure will be considered as illustrated in Figure 1.





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Figure 1 Technologically relevant layers

In looking to the infrastructural requirements for the ENoLL, input from the CoreLabs Deliverable 3.1 [7] identified a number of technological requirements that should be taken into consideration for the creation of a sustainable collaborative environment.

In architectural terms, this encompasses several different technological planes, such as the service plane, the application plane and the communications plane. These requirements will form the basis for a European network of Living Labs. Such requirements can be summated as follows:

Infrastructure for networking and collaboration between several Living Labs. Infrastructure in the role of enabling several Living Labs to exchange information and operate together, with purpose to offer more competitive and advanced services for user-driven research, development and innovation. This will require communication infrastructure the most basic of all the requirements – without a means of communication, there would be no collaboration. Although it might seem to be a requirement that is realized via the other requirements, it’s enabling applications such as: speech, video, email provide a vital piece of orchestration for the entire infrastructure and its objectives.

End-to-end connectivity infrastructure is the means to provide a seamless channel of communication between actors within the collaborative environment.

Infrastructure supporting Living Lab cross-border collaboration, tools and methods. This means infrastructure in the role to enable the digital communication needed to appropriately support Living Lab tools and methods based on cross-border communication with/between groups of distributed users and other Living Lab stake-holders. Presence is an important enabling technology for collaboration since it allows a partner to determine the status of other entities, and their availability for collaboration and communication. More sophisticated presence mechanisms can even give status information regarding their whereabouts and allow seamless ways of communicating with them (e.g. automatically routing communications to the closest station of the user). Presence also refers to the discovery of suitable services for re-use and new service composition across an architecture.

Since the ENoLL wishes to lower the threshold of communication as much as possible within a collaborative environment, the use of standard protocols has to be encouraged to allow interoperability across potentially heterogeneous platforms. A guarantee of interoperability is difficult to make, due to the proliferation of standards and technology platforms. In an environment such as the Living Lab, interoperability across applications, networks and devices needs to be supported. The use of open standards will endeavour to provide common interfaces that enable interoperability.





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As an environment that advertises its open nature, a Living Lab must prove that it is accessible to all actors. The eMobility forum discusses the vision of “access anywhere, any time” – this could really be extended to “access anywhere, any time, any device, any ability”. Applications will be available across all platforms, content will have a guaranteed Quality of Service irrespective of bandwidth or device, any actor – technologically agnostic, physically or mentally disabled, of diverse cultures or language, of any economic background – will be able to access the network via a wider selection of multi-modal interfaces and devices and network connectivity will be guaranteed and seamless.

Security considerations for the collaboration and sharing of information should also be evaluated. Such considerations encompass unauthorized access, replication, or modification of information as well as issues arising from potential alteration of data by unauthorized third parties. User centric security is a consideration in a Living Lab and encompasses issues such as trust between parties and privacy of user information.

Infrastructure being created as a result of Living Lab processes. This means infrastructure in the role of being the target for user-driven creation, such as specifically targeted urban/rural living/societal areas (of buildings, roads, green-areas etc) (example Helsinki/Arabienranta LL) or the “Intelligent Road” of infrastructures supporting inter-vehicle communication (example Botnia LL). As such the ENoLL enables a shared space for information and knowledge sharing. Support for the discovery, sharing, creation and modification of knowledge within the collaboration process must be provided. Knowledge interfaces specific to the information that is shared across the network need to implemented, an example of such an interface might be the use of HL7 in e-Health applications. Ontologies, semantic descriptions and folksonomies can be applied across resources to enable seamless integration of all forms of knowledge. The proliferation of “social” technologies adds another dimension to knowledge sharing with applications such wikis and blogs becoming popular.

3.7.1.1 INFRASTUCTURE PRINCIPLES

It is important that the infrastructure as far as possible support the overall context being as realistic as possible and enables users to explore new opportunities but doing so in the “real world”. A Living Lab must not be experienced by users as an unnatural laboratory environment.

Examples and Experiences

Infrastructure; results, status, experiences and needs being identified and described in CoreLabs deliverables and with highlighted examples by (at least) the following LL’s:

• Belgium/Hasselt – Hasselt LL • Finland/Helsinki, Helsinki (Arabienranta) LL • Sweden/Luleå – Botnia Living Lab • Hungary/Morahalom- Homokhati Rural Living Lab

Needs, challenges and questions: All of this still begs the questions:-

• What type of infrastructure elements could inspire and support users, individually or in group, to become more innovative?

• What infrastructure is missing to enable several Living Labs to operate together in order to provide more competitive and advanced Living Lab services?





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• In order to perform advanced RTD on next generation Internet technology and architectures - Which are the most interesting real life environment RTD infrastructures today (where large user-groups may be engaged to further boost the RTD)?

3.7.1.2 BASIC ARCHITECTURE

It is worth noting that while many singular Living Labs of the network meet the basic requirements of the proposed architecture, many of the issues mentioned as part of the ETP research agendas such as Service Oriented Architecture or pervasive computing are either very much in their infancy or not at all present. Obviously, these can be classed as visionary but may prove vital if the ENoLL sustainability is to be ensured.

Figure 3 Basic Technologies of Living Lab architecture

Figure 3 illustrates the basic technologies that were represented across the majority of surveyed Living Labs and provides an example of a basic technological architecture of a Living Labs.

3.7.1.3 OPEN SERVICE ARCHITECTURE

In today’s IT industry, the cost of software production and maintenance is rocketing. In addition, consumers are demanding more personalised solutions that reflect their wishes and needs, customising each software product would inevitably increase the cost of production and thus the cost to consumers. To counteract these effects, it is desirable to promote and realise a means of software re-use. In achieving such a lofty ambition, software modularity proves effective in essentially creating “spare parts” or components for software. Multiple combinations of these software components can be used to manufacture more complex and robust applications. To enable the easy coupling of these components, it is necessary that their inter-dependencies be kept to a minimum. Such dependency minimisation is known as “loose coupling”. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) can be used to realise such “loose coupling” between interacting software components. SOA’s achieve this by introducing 2 architectural constraints:

• A small set of simple, ubiquitous interfaces to all participating software components.





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• Descriptive messages constrained by an extensible schema delivered through these interfaces.

Web services are SOAs with additional constraints:

• Interfaces are based on Internet protocols such as HTTP, FTP and SMTP

• Except for binary data attachment, messages must be expressed in XML

The software modularity and open interoperability that SOAs aspire to, moulds very closely to the architecture that a P2P network is promoting. P2P networks which are generally heterogeneous and modular in nature can collaborate together to create larger complex, efficient applications. Figure 4 illustrates the inclusion of an SOA structure into our Living Labs architecture. The service modules are small pieces of re-usable components that can be used to create customised and cost effective applications.

Figure 4 Living Labs architecture including SOA

In order to encourage competition through innovation and differentiation and to remove barriers for interoperability, supporting a seamless and easy to use experience for end-users, the SOA framework must support open standards where it is possible to build, deploy and manage applications in a multi-vendor, multi-platform environment.

The ENoLL extends this concept to incorporate the end-user at all stages of design and validation. Taking the concept a step further, a network of Living Labs introduces new services & platforms, diverse users and a greater variety of interfaces and communication protocols. Figure 5 illustrates the possibilities of software re-use and composition across a networking of Living Labs all supporting service oriented architecture.





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Figure 5 Service compositions across a network of Living Labs

3.8 Methods & Tools

Introduction

Related to Living Labs, methods and tools issues can be divided in several different categories, depending on the different “roles” that the methods and tools may have: • Methods and tools as results, being created in Living Lab processes. This means

methods and tools in the role of being the target for user-driven creation, such as <examples>.

• Methods and tools to engage and activate users. This means infrastructure in the role to enable the digital communication needed to appropriately support Living Lab tools and methods based on cross-border communication with/between groups of distributed users and other Living Lab stake-holders.

• Methods and Tools to support cross-border collaboration. As such the ENoLL enables a shared space for information and knowledge sharing. Support for the discovery, sharing, creation and modification of knowledge within the collaboration process must be provided. Knowledge interfaces specific to the information that is shared across the network need to implemented, an example of such an interface might be the use of HL7 in e-Health applications. Ontology and semantic descriptions can be applied across resources to enable seamless integration of all forms of knowledge. The proliferation of “social” technologies adds another dimension to knowledge sharing with applications such wikis and blogs becoming popular. Presence is an important enabling technology for collaboration since it allows a partner to determine the status of other entities, and their availability for collaboration and communication. More sophisticated presence mechanisms can even give status information regarding their whereabouts and allow seamless ways of communicating with them (e.g. automatically routing communications to the closest station of the user). Presence also refers to the discovery of suitable services for re-use and new service composition across architectures.

• Methods and tools to extract and aggregate important elements from “background noise”. This means...

• Methods and tools needed to manage IPR and create new (business) values and models. The living labs foster the formation of online communities and provide existing rural communities with technical support. For geographical and demographical reasons the Internet penetration in rural areas is far from that in larger cities. It seems that current business models and technologies cannot achieve breakthrough in this area. Therefore we need new business models which are closer to real life situations in rural areas, villages.





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For example, in a small community people know each other and they try to solve any arising problems in much closer cooperation than in larger towns and cities. From the aspect of technology and business models the Wireless Mesh Network solution fits perfectly into this picture. Utilizing this solution a community can achieve wireless network coverage for a small town or village. The network infrastructure is managed by volunteer citizens. As the whole system is self-healing and self-tuning, the system can be expanded in a plug and play manner without special knowledge. With this solution the whole community will have network access and will be able to communicate with each other through this data network. The Internet access can be provided by volunteers sharing their already existing wired connections. As a free source for the community, the mayor’s office may provide the whole village/town with several broadband wired gateways. The WMN can be used to extend the range and the services of an already existing WiFi based ISP (W-ISP) or ISP’s.

• Methods and tools harmonisation to enable collaboration between Living Labs. Methods and tools in the role of enabling several Living Labs to exchange information and operate together, with purpose to offer more competitive and advanced services for user-driven research, development and innovation.

Principles

It is important that the methods and tools as far as possible support the overall context being as realistic as possible and enables users to explore new opportunities but doing so in the “real world”. A Living Lab must not be experienced by users as an unnatural laboratory environment.

Examples and Experiences

Methods and Tools; results, status, experiences being identified and described in CoreLabs deliverables and with highlighted examples by the following LL’s: • Hungary/Morahalom- Homokhati Rural Living Lab • Mobile City Bremen • Mobile City Bregenz • Helsinki Living Lab • Freeband Experience Living Lab • Botnia Living Lab • Arc Labs Waterford • …

Needs, challenges and questions:

Workshop questions: • What type of method and tools could inspire and support users, individually or in group,

to become more innovative? • What methods and tools are missing to enable several Living Labs to operate together in

order to provide more competitive and advanced Living Lab services?

Complementary questions: • How we can measure and identify the roles associated with the open and permanent

innovation process, locally? • How the generic observation and measurement check-list should be developed as an

operational instrument to acquire quantitative and qualitative information, which is used in actual process of information gathering:





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- Living Labs report production (data, observations): first interim monitoring and assessment reports - Living Labs evaluation (assessment and conclusions). - Comparative analysis of results across Living Labs, and over-all evaluation of results.

The results of the Corelabs project, manifested in the ‘Method & Tool Inventory and Taxonomy’, and in the ‘Best Practice Report’ formed the basis for the definition of Living Labs standards. In spite of the identification and collection of the most effective methods and tools and best practices, the Living Labs approach lacked a standardised reference methodology as a means to support the innovation process in creating new products and services. The same was valid when it comes up to setting up and configuring a Living Lab from the scratch. As such with the emergence of the second wave of Living Labs, many organizations and stakeholders appeared which do not yet possess a Living Lab of their own, but intend to establish a Living Lab in near future. Particularly for these candidates, a standardized guideline of how to set up and configure a Living Lab would be a very valuable contribution. Born out of this need, a coherent, mature and transferable suite of methods and tools for Living Labs has been created. This suite of methods and tools shall represent a guideline for creating new products and services, as well as a guideline for setting up/configuring a Living Lab from the scratch. It is foreseen by the Corelabs consortium that the reference methodology shall be a working document at least until 2009 in order to give the LL community a chance to incorporate their expertise and experiences. During that time and afterwards the reference methodology shall be made available to a broad community of stakeholders via the Corelabs Repository which is an additional component of the CoreLabs collaboration portal. Apart from the Living Labs methods, several tools which support the methods have been identified in the context of the Corelabs taxonomy. Other initiatives and projects, such as the Laboranova project (www.laboranova.com) are currently investigating Living Labs tools for collaborative working environments in more detail.

3.9 Interoperability in different Domains

Workshop questions: • Which domains are important to consider in terms of interoperability? • Where has interoperability between domains proven successful (and with which

technologies)? • Which technical aspects of interoperability between domains need to be considered in

future research?





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Experiences and Examples

During the events promoting the introduction of the second wave of Living Labs it became obvious through several interviews that many European second wave candidates focus upon particular domains. This fact underlines the need to ensure interoperability in different domains. A good example which highlights the interoperability in a very different domain and context was conducted in South Africa by [16]. There the establishment of a Living Lab in a rural environment in and around the Ndlovu Medical Centre (NMC) in Elandsdoorn (Limpopo province) South Africa was achieved while targeting a new beneficiary group. Aim was to establish an approach to develop a user friendly healthcare solution that is culturally appropriate, robust and sustainable in the African rural context. As a rural based project the Living Lab provided community based solutions that are scalable and replicable on the African continent. In this joint initiative, the standardization framework of the CoreLabs project was applied in a rural context. The existing Living Labs cases (as described in existing Corelabs deliverables) and the work in Corelabs so far were used as a reference point to define how to design and implement a novel Living Lab, e.g. the set-up of a Living Lab in the area of Pretoria, with emphasize on the interconnection between rural and urban areas. In this sense this initiative establishes a bridge between Europe and South Africa allowing (research) insights and ideas are exchanged and validated. This was illustrated in the Singazenzela project. Singa involves children as co-creators of a game tool. The game is a metaphor of a place where children can do things for themselves that normally would be harder to achieve in the real world such as have fun, make new friends, store personal documents and get help with finding services for civilians. Without going into details what can be reported clearly are the strengths and weakness of the process of facilitating user participation and involvement. Facilitating co-creation of product and service or application development is the core service offered by Singazenzela. The figure below illustrates how the Harmonization Cube was helpful in setting the scene and addressing the relevant issues when setting up a Living Lab in Ndlovu.





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4 ROADMAP ACTIONS AND MILESTONES

4.1 Today – Current status of Living Labs

Over the last few years, a diverse multitude of Living Lab systems/environments have been initiated across Europe. As of 17 Oct 2007, when the “second wave” of Living Labs entered the network, altogether fifty-one Living Labs will be members of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL).

Most of the Living Labs in Europe are not separate legal entities themselves, but are rather entities hosted by non-commercial bodies (typically a university or municipality). A majority of the observed Living Labs, have a focus on user-driven development of ICT intensive services. In its nature most existing Living Labs are based on business-citizens-government-academia partnerships. The driving power comes from a combination of investors (financing LL build-up), customers (buying services) and partners (engaged in LL federation). One organisation may of course take a combination of roles (e.g. both investor and customer). By nature benefits are both recognized and anticipated by all drivers (being the reason for their engagement).´Several large countries outside Europe (China, Brazil, South Africa etc) are already active as well. These nations/regions represent large populations and key markets, which is of fundamental importance for European industry.

4.2 Living Lab Maturity Phases

Though great variations exist, the Living Labs maturity and development generally go through a sequence of maturity phases as highlighted below.

Figure 03 LL Maturity Steps

4.3 2007 second half - Portuguese Presidency - ENoLL 2nd wave launch

Oct 16 Draft Living Lab Roadmap presented

Oct 17 ENoLL 2nd wave Launch Event

Nov 08 ENoLL 3rd wave preparatory event in Slovenia





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Nov 30 Living Lab Roadmap – 2nd version available

Dec 15 CLOCK Coordination Action project ends

4.4 2008 first half - Slovenian Presidency - ENoLL 3rd wave

Feb 27 CoreLabs Coordination Action project ends

June ENoLL 3rd wave Launch Event (timing tbc)

4.5 2008 second half - French Presidency - Completion of ENoLL launch

# to be established #

4.6 2009 first half - Czech Presidency


4.7 2009 second half - Swedish Presidency


4.8 2010 and beyond






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5 COLLABORATION AND NETWORKING

5.1 The Living Labs Portfolio

There is an emerging collaborative structure, directly associated to the increasing interest for user-centric experimentation and validation in general and the European Network of Living Labs in particular. Currently (Oct 2007) this structure comprises: • European Network of Living Labs, • Living Labs Open Innovation Community • Living Labs Partner Network (emerging) • Living Labs related projects • Living Labs Portfolio Leadership Group

These elements of the collaborative structure are described further below:

5.1.1 EUROPEAN NETWORK OF LIVING LABS

The European Network of Living Labs ENoLL comprises (Nov. 2007) 52 different existing or emerging Living Labs, which have committed to exchange experiences and develop ways to collaborate which aims to enable net-based services for user-driven research, development and innovation.

Figure 04 ENoLL Headquarters Map





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5.1.2 LIVING LABS OPEN INNOVATION COMMUNITY

At the same time a “Living Lab Open Innovation Community was launched giving any person interested in Living Labs a mechanism to get information and connect into on-going activities.

5.1.3 EMERGING LIVING LABS PARTNER NETWORK


5.1.4 LIVING LABS RELATED PROJECTS

Currently the Living Labs related projects include eight (8) EU-FP6 projects; • CoreLabs (CA) • CLOCK (CA) • Collaboration@Rural (IP) • CoSpaces (IP) • Ecospace (IP) • Laboranova (IP) • WearIT@Work (IP) • OpenFutures (SSA).

5.1.5 LIVING LABS PORTFOLIO LEADERSHIP GROUP

The Living Labs Portfolio Leadership Group (LLP-LG) is currently acting as the main body for coordination of plans and activities (including this roadmap).





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5.2 From Regional Networks to Global Reach

REGIONAL AND NATIONAL COOPERATION

Importance, Driver(s) and Examples: Activities on national basis are important and should be complementary to the initiatives taken on European an International arena. LL experience exchange help to identify national demands on Living Labs and for SMEs, initially targeting a rather homogeneous (no barriers such as language, legislation and culture etc) domestic market, it is easier to work with a national LL network. Expected and already visible main driver in this dimension are national funding agencies such as Swedish innovation agency VINNOVA which recently (April 2007) launched a two year Living Labs pilot programme which invest in build-up of five new Swedish Living Labs connected in national Living Labs network. Other examples are; Finnish ICT SHOK LLs and Test-beds, Portuguese, German (big program in progress?), Dutch and Belgian initiatives.

The “DC10” UK Living Labs initiative seeks to create greater knowledge of, and commitment to, the Living Labs approach and focuses on nine main themes:

1. User Centred Design & Production

e.g. How will users be integral to all phases of the project? How will the project give incentive to real world participation in its design, delivery and sustainability? Discussion of examples will be provided at the Living Lab workshop.

2. Open and Creative Innovation Processes

e.g. How will the project demonstrate that it is responding to demand-driven requirements in real world settings? How will the project ensure that it is flexible enough to maintain an open and creative approach to new ideas throughout all phases of the project?

3. Demonstrate social innovation

e.g. Where is the step-change in patterns of behaviour (of living and/or working) occurring?

4. Value Creation e.g. employee/organization value, citizen/user value, alliance partner value, societal value etc

5. Scalability e.g. What is it about the work-stream/project which is likely to scale? What’s the process for how this might be achieved?

6. Commitment to share information and experience

e.g. provide an overview here of main approaches

7. Genuine cross-sector collaboration

e.g. What is it about the structure and process of the project which will encourage genuine collaboration across sectors?





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8. Inclusion

e.g. How will the project contribute to improving social inclusion and the empowerment of users through a more open and creative approach to innovation?

9. Collaborative networking

e.g. How will the project ensure that its work is made available and accessible to other related projects and networks, including what form of licensing arrangements, such as Creative commons, would be used to support this?

Network of Dutch Living Labs

The Netherlands has one of the most advanced service economies in the Western world. Thus, the Netherlands can be characterized as a gateway to Europe with a highly developed cluster of financial and knowledge-intensive services and extensive public facilities. Many non-European companies use their base in the Netherlands as a springboard and test market. The Netherlands enjoys good ICT infrastructure with major Internet exchanges, coupled with high acceptance of the Internet and high broadband penetration that is ideal for a living lab approach to research where the social and technological innovations are researched together. The service sector is a growing part of our GNP. Traditionally, the users in the Netherlands are among the first to adapt innovative methods based on new technological and social possibilities. This is an ideal situation for creating a Living Lab to test new services.

Telematica Institute is involved in several Dutch initiatives: Holland Living Labs (together with CETIM), Amsterdam Living Lab, the current Freeband initiative and has been involved in “Kenniswijk” the forerunner of the current Eindhoven’s Brainport.

These initiatives are related to a large innovation program that is being developed by the Ministry of Economic affairs called “The service society”. Living Labs are at the core of this program as research method to determine successful innovation approaches. This innovation program will be an eight year program. Decisions on this program will be taken in 2008 with an expected start in 2009.

The Amsterdam Living Lab aims at an innovation program of almost € 20 million for three years with a Dutch government of € 8 million of which € 4 million of the regional government of Amsterdam (foreseen start in 2008), Freeband is an innovation program more than € 80 million for 7 years with € 40 million from the Dutch government (finish in 2008).

Interesting (future) research topics of the Network of Dutch Living Labs are:





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Intelligent environments allow for the design of new stimuli from which people can create their own meaningful experiences, which raise new challenges and ask for new methods for data collection and analysis. Upcoming mobile devices and services tend to become more and more personalized and adaptable to the user, user experiences generally tend to evolve over time and the user’s experiences in prolonged use of applications are often crucial to their success. Thus, longer-term studies are needed in order to capture the issue of evolving user experiences. At the same time, these emergent technologies have qualities that can be exploited in in-situ evaluation? What are these qualities, what is the impact of using such innovative tools for in-situ research and evaluation as well?

Thus, data collection might not be an issue, as much data can be automatically captured, but how do we deal with the resulting (huge) data set? How can we interpret the data in a meaningful and useful way? How to inform the design of new services, how to improve systems design, how to design better context-aware systems. In all of this, privacy remains a delicate issue.

Another important aspect for the success of future in-situ research is the permanent availability of (interconnected) intelligent Living Labs. Results are not simply scalable, for this, methodologies and protocols are needed.

EUROPEAN CROSS-BORDER COOPERATION

Importance, Driver(s) and Examples: Nordic Innovation Centre (project: ENoLL/Nordic), NordForsk (project: NoriaNet), Central European (Slovenian based), IberNoLL (tbc)

Example – ENoLL/Nordic

Nordic Living Labs can - as integral elements of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL, www.openlivinglabs.eu ) - create Nordic-scale experimentation platforms and pilot user groups for new services, business and technology and thus enhance new market and industry creation. By applying Living Lab thinking and methodology also for public sector, complementary opportunities can be explored.

Besides a user centred innovation processes the time span to market adaptation should be as short as possible, in particular for ICT products and services. One way to obtain this is concurrent interaction between all parties involved in the value network: from the end-users to producer and basic research communities.

ENoLL/Nordic, a Nordic Network of User-Driven Innovation and livinglabbing, was established in May 2007 with support of the Nordic Innovation Centres (NICs). This regional Living Lab network promotes user-driven innovation and “livinglabbing” through national, Nordic, European and International networking and active awareness rising among industry, academia and public sector.

The critical success factors (Living Lab services and assets) as well as proofs of concept (examples of added values for industry and academy) will be collected and described in the "Living Lab Toolbox" and "Industry guide".

The Toolbox will be co-compiled by the project consortium and the Nordic Network for User-driven Innovation and Livinglabbing in collaboration with the other NIC UDI projects.

It is also of outmost importance that the Living Labs are connected and linked together. Trough the Living Labs network a regional customer who needs access to Living Lab services somewhere else (e.g due to a specific product launch) can involve pilot users and potential customers in a specific part of the globe. Services and products of today often must be developed for an international market in the first attempt.





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ENoLL/Nordic will organize 10 workshops during 2007-2008 and compiles two guides for open delivery: one for Living Lab service providers and one for of their customer organisations. ENoLL/Nordic supports the rest of the NIC funded innovation projects as a test environment.

GLOBAL COOPERATION

Of particular interest are emerging economies such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries. Other countries that fall into this kind of emerging market include Turkey, Romania and Mexico etc. This kind of emerging market is very complex to understand as there is no common cultural base. Consequently an end user centric development process being followed has many advantages in such environments. The local presence and interaction with end users and stakeholders is able to cope with rapidly changing policy and business conditions due to the sometimes high growth rates of the national economy. Socioeconomic processes are extremely dynamic causing rapidly changing requirements. Additionally societal structures are very heterogeneous reflecting social and cultural diversity. Again there is continuous change on these structures due to the economic progression of the developing world. Accordingly the interoperation between these structures is difficult to oversee. Livinglabbing addresses these aspects at its core and enables to trace these changing requirements in real time.

Living Labs provide great value for validating technology advancements in an environment that does not allow to simply being extrapolated form state of the art (European) technology. Particularly Living Labs in developing countries or emerging economies such as the BRICS provide data on the applicability and acceptance of “European” technology paradigms based on an understanding of local markets and user requirements.

Living Lab Networks should therefore aim at increasing the use of Living Labs as a methodology in developing countries or emerging economies to guide the design and development of appropriate/relevant technologies (in Europe) for deployment in emerging economies.

Most importantly – FP7 WP2009/10 should also provide in the urgent need to increase “technology research” (in contrast to road-mapping and dissemination) in emerging economies to build up human research capacity and a sound technology skills base in these regions.





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6 STRATEGY AND RECOMMENDATIONS, INVESTMENTS AND BENEFITS

6.1 ICT Research and Technology Development (RTD)

Due to varying maturity and different thematic focus, demands for RTD vary among ENoLL members. Most Living Labs’ immediate ICT needs are related to fundamental Living Lab instrumentation such as database systems for user management and statistical analysis and tools and infrastructure for collaboration. Here the basic LL needs can be solved by integration and application of existing technology.

However, at the ENoLL Living Lab ”frontiers” 2-4 years ahead, quite specific needs for RTD have been identified, deemed critical for ENoLL success in the 2009-10 timeframe and beyond. Hence, investments in LL enabling ICT RTD, addressing these needs, should start today in order to have results ready when demands grow.

The most important RTD, specifically driven by the Living Labs principles, is RTD on ICT infrastructures, environments and tools which enable the following target outcome:

6.1.1 LIVING LABS PLATFORM - REFERENCE MODEL AND PRINCIPAL ARCHITECTURE

Well integrated LL systems where ICT ”LL/ENoLL functional components” can be integrated, added, removed and reintegrated, step-by-step, during the gradual development and maturation of current and future Living Labs in ENoLL.

Obviously, here is an opportunity for ENoLL to offer, to its members, an open source based ”LL toolbox” of downloadable LL/ENoLL modules, which have been checked to be compatible and to strengthen LL interoperability.

RTD need: • A Living Lab reference model which suggests a suitable break-down of Living Labs total

functionality into suitable functional components. • A Living Lab reference architecture which suggest a suitable break-down into modules

(technical components) allowing step-wise build-up and assembly of modules into an ENoLL harmonized Living Labs system/platform.

6.1.2 COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS FOR OPEN CROSS-BORDER CO-CREATION

The most central Living Labs capability is to offer powerful means for different individual stakeholders from different types of organisations and large user groups to interact and collaborate in a way which strongly promotes and empowers creativity. RTD need: • Cross-border creative activities (idea modelling etc) in large distributed groups • Synchronous version of “Innovation Jams”, …. • Social networking in the context of research and development for innovations • Integration of emerging technologies regarding Web 2.0 and Next Generation Internet

into trusted collaborative environments • Mapping and routing of ideas and knowledge • Empowering and facilitating collective "wisdom of crowds"





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6.1.3 SUSTAINABLE LARGE SCALE USER ENGAGEMENT IN OPEN INNOVATION

Today, open innovation is typically triggered by an “inside organisation” offering an innovation environment (web portal) to the outside and then capturing and leveraging the outside contributions (ideas, proposals and content etc) which match the business model of the “inside”. However, to realize these objectives, scouting mechanisms and marketplaces for innovation have to be created. Practicioners like Procter&Gamble created or were involved in the creation of initiatives like Innocentive, yet2.com or NineSigma. All of them are devoted to providing spaces for Open Innovation to realize its potential and directed to different levels of the process, from the concrete ones where a very concrete solution is searched (e.g. Innocentive) to more exploratory ones like NineSigma where long or medium term involvements are pursued.

These typical examples show how ICT can help in the Open Innovation process. However these examples also typically reveal a lack of certain key capabilities which are instrumental for Living Lab principles and mode of operations.

RTD need: • Framework for intelligent and adaptable user interfaces to enable user-driven

improvement of the open innovation environment itself • User data in innovation processes: what data and how to manage it • Options for the individual to control integrity and privacy. • Co-creation support & feedback mechanisms on tool adoption & appropriation processes

6.1.4 CATEGORIZATION AND ROUTING OF REAL LIFE SPONTANEOUS REACTIONS

A Living Lab should support its users to trigger innovation in real life/work contexts. It is said that “urgency is the mother of invention”. A large user community is potentially a very powerful source of market relevant ideas and innovations triggered by user’s reactions and urges in their normal real life environments. However, in order to capture the urge (spontaneous reactions/ideas), users needs very easy ways to express their ideas. This indicates that users should be allowed to express themselves in “free format” and to submit the idea with no particular address.

RTD need: • Easy to use mechanisms for users, in normal real life environments, to spontaneously

express reactions, urges and ideas. • Categorization of ideas based on context and content. • Sorting and clustering of ideas into “principal ideas” based on category • Routing (addressing) of “principal ideas” to appropriate receivers





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6.1.5 LIVING LAB PLATFORM FOR SERVICE EXPERIMENTATION

Living Labs currently provide value in highly local and specific circumstances, while at the same time exchanging ideas and best practices on a European level. Market realities as well as experiences with other research infrastructures such as technical test-beds make it clear that in order to realise a radical improvement in terms of success rate and impact, user-driven Living Lab and Open Innovation platforms should extend their reach to include several markets and environments at the same time. An interlinked European Living Lab space providing real-time access to local resources would offer not just the much-needed large-scale effects, but would also provide a unique networked testing ground taking into account and valuing the heterogeneity of a multicultural Europe. Also, a distributed European-wide service experimentation environment would enable differentiated testing and concurrent experimentation with different set-ups and several business architectures, recognising and controlling for local circumstances. This kind of experimentation can also be supported by new service science concepts.

A serious R&D effort is necessary into the concept, components and practical feasibility of a distributed, virtual service experimentation platform for large-scale Living Lab research. Such a platform should be open and entirely technology agnostic, linking valuable components and resources residing at the local level. Advanced and open identity management and monitoring, context and location awareness, group awareness and other components could be offered to all in a federated manner. This would enable open innovation experimentation including testing various business architectures and revenue models. New service science concepts should be applied to support this kind of experimentation. Also, this would create a much-needed European Living Lab space with experienced local hubs that European R&D projects in multiple domains could fruitfully make use of.

RTD need: • Development and experimentation of new service components, interfaces and

architectures aimed at large-scale service, organisational and societal innovation. • A structured framework for interoperability within Living Labs in order to guarantee a

European approach.

6.1.6 LIVING LAB PLATFORM - EXTENSION FOR BUSINESS MODEL EXPERIENCE

RTD is needed addressing the technical challenges to arrange for cost effective pilot trials for business validation of innovations, in as realistic conditions as possible, as a basis for decisions about the often very significant investments needed to make a real market introduction. RTD topics include:

RTD need: • Trusted and secure platform for piloting of new charging and payment models • Simulations (serious games) and virtual trials of dynamic innovation effects, such as new

usage patterns, business/market development and side-effects • Solutions for open and easy pilot access to media (content) which instruments adequate

protection against fraud/misuse of proprietary content (not yet publicly released or without appropriate copyright protection).





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6.1.7 VIRTUAL CITY AND SOCIO-SEMANTIC (WIRELESS) INTERNET OF THINGS

Living Labs can be seen as virtual overlays that are in continuous interaction with the physical space (real world) and in which users are able to move around freely. The recent worldwide wireless and digital city initiatives are complementary, embryonic ways of providing virtual public mobile spaces, but the shortcomings of these initiatives have become highly apparent over the last months. It has become clear that offering wireless access without stimulating content and applications that are directly related to the physical-virtual interaction itself, offers insufficient added value. The most innovative and most valuable approach is aimed at the creation of open, ambient service experimentation environments that support and enrich the interaction of people, communities and objects with the physical environment and with each other, where technology is not the end in itself but a powerful goal-oriented tool.

New interaction models between physical and virtual worlds should be developed to enhance innovation, emphasizing the mobile context and experimenting with new concepts of private and public spheres. R&D efforts into the (wireless) internet of things should be extended and applied in a Living Lab context. This refers to a near-future environment full of communicating, metadata-rich objects. An important research strand is looking at socio-semantics to transform the (wireless) internet of things into a socially meaningful context. There is an urgent need to conduct more research in this field at the theoretical level but also at the empirical level, i.e. to monitor and explore its dynamics in real-life situations.

RTD needed: • Development and experimental implementation of new ambient public-private sphere

concepts and new physical-virtual interaction models including socio-semantics. • Virtual environments and markets for open innovation of real world market services and

products

6.1.8 TREND DETECTION AND ANALYSIS OF USAGE PATTERNS

< to be described >

6.1.9 EASY VISUALISATION AND MODELLING OF MACHINE LEARNING

< to be described >

TARGET OUTCOME

Past experiences like the IBM Innovation Jams that captured more than 50.000 IBM and related employees showed the power of information technologies when applied to large groups but also showed the limitation of their dynamics, in terms of engaging people and preventing free riders and recognition of contributors. This type of groups could, of course, be set-up ad-hoc or continuously creating communities and integrating them with the infrastructure of companies, living labs, science parks or even political structures for promoting innovation and participation in political settings.





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Living Labs, and in general any attempt of capturing the users experience, especially in pre-commercial platform exploration, face the problem of the inadequacy of the instruments. The use of qualitative instruments that are based on extensive human intervention prevents not only its use in large scale projects but also its use longitudinally, aiming to capture the right moment where groups of users use a certain product in an unintended way or where untargeted groups appear. Capturing user input in large groups cannot be done without applying IT methodologies, IT infrastructures, support for end-user co-creation & feedback mechanisms and data mining techniques. This is a basic requirement to realize the benefits of experimentation in large users groups.

Some of the ideas around these concepts can be presented as:

EXPECTED IMPACT

< to be described >

FUNDING SCHEMES

< to be described >

6.2 Socio-economic research

Technological advances increase spectrum of possible solutions. When combined with the increase and more available knowledge, innovation management will shift from an integrated model to an open model.

The locus of innovation can therefore no longer be situated in the R&D centres of larger companies but in the society itself. Central to this shift in locus is the role of users in the innovation process. Users are not anymore simple receivers but active actors in the innovation process.

In this context experimentation, and especially experimentation in real life environments, has become a key element of innovation. The significantly changed environment demands a change in the type of policies and instruments that aim at its support.

ICT based experimental platforms in real life contexts both provide services to the different actors and act themselves as intermediaries in the innovation process by connecting different and unrelated agents. This pro-active connection is central in an Open Innovation environment where many companies, professionals, research institutions, public bodies and citizens can actively be engaged in the innovation process. However, these models are still in their infancy, in an environment still dominated by the Porterian cluster conception. Therefore more research is needed to understand them and to extract the key elements that could be central in structuring policies and instruments for a societal Open Innovation model matching the European reality.

The literature tells us that consistent public policies, innovative regulatory systems and large investments are needed to create over time the conditions to develop complex socio-technical systems like Living Labs and mitigate three critical uncertainties associated with the adjustment process: (a) unclear expectations related to the level of dematerialization of social and economic activities; (b) effective adoption patterns of new technologies by citizens and customers, particularly influenced by accessibility, affordability and usability; and (c) unpredictability of demand for interactive services from both localized and geographically dispersed communities. A large body of evidence supports the critical need for adequately managing these aforementioned uncertainties and shows the necessity of effective infrastructures, incentives and adequate institutional frameworks to be promoted over time and across space.





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On the other hand, these incentives for infrastructures should be continuous, but articulated with the need to foster knowledge networks – communities of creation, interest or proximity – to mobilize individuals, communities and organizations for the Living Labs. This requires not only a continuous long-term public effort, but also a better understanding of the effectiveness of the mix of public support mechanisms and private incentives necessary for the development of Living Labs. Market mechanisms do not necessarily work at the level of the issues associated with Living Labs, namely in less favourable zones.

Socio-economic research calls for an interdisciplinary approach to create, accumulate and disseminate knowledge related to Living Labs. While the multidisciplinary approach keeps the separated perspectives from each discipline, Living Labs must integrate methods and perspectives from diverse disciplines and fields of research to create a multidimensional problem solving tool.

The most important target outcome of Socio-economic research, specifically driven by the Living Labs principles is described below:

6.2.1 SOCIO-TECHNOLOGICAL PLAYGROUND FOR USER INNOVATION

ICT and internet developments are increasingly embedded in the everyday socio-cultural world of people and communities. The socio-technological interplay between the global social context and new media technologies sets new challenges for the European IST and media industry to profoundly understand what drives groups of people to adopt and use media technologies in their communication and interactions. Making the Web social and avoiding digital exclusion on all levels takes more than only developing technological Web 2.0 tools for participatory communication.

For this, a substantial R&D effort is required on social level. First the requirements for designing and developing new technologies need to be extended from the individual user characteristics to the social ecosystem. This refers to the involvement of groups of specialised users (like ‘lead users’) and of producing users (like citizen journalists and bloggers) in early research and development phases. However the still uncharted territory is the everyday users and the way they are involved in innovation trajectories. Only a harmonised and distributed Living Lab space in Europe makes it possible to identify and extract the innovative potential of all European citizens. This will enable technological and service innovation to become embedded within economic and social innovation.

Thus a European collective of ICT playgrounds will on the one hand increase the competitive power of European ICT and media industry by a more people-oriented technological innovation capacity. On the other hand social research via Living Labs can help in strengthening the social cohesion between people, communities, regions and countries.

Socio-economic research need: • Development and experimentation of multi-methodological Living Lab tool sets for in-

depth investigation of the mutual shaping between people, communities and associations on the one hand and converging ambient technologies on the other hand.

Formal modelling and Best Practise Analysis of ICT-enabled Real Life Experimentation Based Environments. • Networking and Early stage innovation processes • Successful Regional, Theme/Sector Collaborations • New paradigms for IPR in socio-technical environments • New cluster/partnership formats and cooperation formulas





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• Events and other innovation triggers

Real Life Experimental Platforms, such as Living Labs, as Service Providers and Intermediaries in the Research, Development and Innovation Process • Services for Open Innovation • Open Innovation at societal level in an European Context • Regional policy and Open Innovation • Knowledge Networks • Mobilization of communities of creation

Studies of short term and long term impacts from Living Labs • Full life-cycle impact on services/products • Impact on individuals and organisations (e.g. innovation capability) • Socio-economic impact

EXPECTED IMPACT

The expected impact of the Living Lab approach can be visualized through an analysis of eleven existing Living Labs based on comprehensive interviews supported by extensive questionnaires. The results of these interviews can be summarized in the following two tables:

On the left hand side, the five evaluation criteria for Living Labs are identified. On the right hand side, the comparative performance of Living Labs against the “conventional” validation methodologies, highlighting the cases where this can be clearly detected, is presented.

Table 02: Comparison of alternative user centred methodologies

Relevance (a) Prior Technology Mapping Socio-economic Analysis Purposeful Panel Selection Ex-post Statistical Control Direct Analysis Techniques Indirect Analysis Techniques

Yes Yes/No Yes Yes Yes/No Yes

Yes No Yes Yes Yes/No Yes

Efficiency (b) Reusability of results Stakeholders involvement Payoffs to Stakeholders Charges to Stakeholders CWE based methodologies

Yes/No Yes Yes Yes Yes/No

Yes/No No No No Yes/No

Legend:

(a) the appropriateness of a project/programme design to the needs/tasks addressed and to the assumptions made and/or context parameters





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(b) the extent to which the project/programme inputs were supplied and activities organised in the most appropriate way and at the least cost to generate the final results

Table 03: Comparison of alternative user centred methodologies (cont’d)

Efficacy / Effectiveness (c) Publicity of results “Returning Customer” Increasing number of panellists In situ evaluation Product/Service ideation Product/Service conception Product/Service development Product/Service launch

Yes/No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

No Yes No No No No Yes Yes

Sustainability (d) Dependency on external funding Ethical Issues Privacy Issues Security Issues Gender Issues Replicability

Yes No Yes Yes/No No Yes

Yes No Yes No No Yes

Impact (e) Time to market New/Improved products/services Patent applications Creation of new companies Improved functionalities Better reliability of products/services Reduced complexity of products/services New or increased demand User satisfaction User empowerment Local community National/International community

Yes/No Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Yes Yes Yes/No No Yes/No No No No No No No No

Legend:

(c) degree of achievement of a project/programme results in terms of benefits actually received by the stakeholders involved;

(d) attitude of a project/programme to generate positive effects even after its end (or the exhaustion of external funding);

(e) extent to which the overall objectives of the project/programme were achieved, and the contribution of the project to their achievement.





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It is quite evident from the above comparison that the “added value” of Living Labs over traditional (user centred) validation methodologies, especially lies in the efficiency (2), efficacy (3) and impact (5) evaluation criteria.

Regarding efficiency, in spite of the absence of meaningful reporting in terms of costs, it can be stated that the presence of a higher number of stakeholders, apart from the Living Lab owner, interested in the running of the pilots (compared to the traditional, “laboratory” case where this is limited to a single organisation) may reduce the overall cost of the trials, perhaps in exchange for a wider and more timely publicity of results.

While it might be expected that the cost of gathering a few people in a laboratory may be lower than a large scale, “real-life” panel conducted over a whole population, the use of even simple ICT-supported methods (like log analysis for example) or solutions (like tools for collective decision making or consensus reaching) can positively affect this evaluation criterion. Furthermore, it seems possible to conclude from the survey performed that a Living Lab can offer a cost-effective methodology for earlier incorporation of users in the product/service creation cycle, so that more expensive product/service changes in the later phases can be prevented.

However, it is in the efficacy (or effectiveness) area that Living Labs seem to show their most significant performance. By making reference of a real, and reportedly growing in number, community of people, it is not just that the unit cost of the trial scales down, but a wider scope of analysis is allowed (including ideation and conception of products and services, not very often implemented in the traditional approach), and, what is most important, the benefits of “in situ” validation are gained.

This reflects into a list of impact indicators where most user-related features like better reliability, reduced complexity, satisfaction, empowerment and even consumer demand are reportedly enhanced and contextualised, with implications to both the local and the (inter)national community.

Whether or not this can be sufficient to justify an increased use of Living Labs, e.g. by the ICT industry, is partly a matter of compared costs and benefits and partly a result of the specific subject matter of validation. In other words, the larger the potential or actual scale of distribution/consumption is for the targeted good or service, the more useful can eventually prove the recourse to Living Labs methodology.

FUNDING SCHEMES

DG INFSO and/or RTD, FP7 2009-10 (tbc)





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6.3 Research infrastructure

The number of potentially connected nodes within urban and rural environments that support Living Labs initiatives has significantly increased in the last couple of years, and includes GSM/GPRS wired PDAs, WiFi enabled laptops, 3G mobile phones, ADSL connected game consoles and entertainment PCs, Bluetooth tablet PCs, Videophones, Interactive TVs, real-time environment sensors (e.g. air and water quality), large databases (corporations, libraries, museums, public administration), GPS oriented cars, and GPS traceable trucks and buses. Also, new layers of territory-related data and information are been created in a daily basis, like municipal geographic information, Internet city guides, interactive maps and routes, and 3D worlds. In fact, as computers and communication networks become ubiquitous and interlinked, they will turn out to be another invisible urban infrastructure, such as the new paradigm of semantic grids, analogous to public utilities like electric grids, water distribution systems and sewage systems that sustain daily life. To cope with this increased complexity, research on Open Access Networks as new paradigm of open and standardized communication infrastructure is needed.

TARGET OUTCOME

Within the context of Open Access Networks for Living Labs, what strategies should be followed to implement and/or expand OAN in the varied geographies where Living Labs may flourish? What mix of technologies is most suitable to provide broadband over OAN in both urban and rural Living Labs? On the Living Labs supply-side, what mix of services and contents are more competitive over an OAN infrastructure? On the demand-side, what are the users’ latent needs and wants? What kind of regulatory and interoperability mechanisms should be implemented to guarantee heterogeneity, diversification and competition among Living Labs service providers? What are the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders involved in the implementation and operation of Living Labs OANs with emphasis on public-private partnerships? What is the role of closed networks operators in the development of open and neutral networks? What level of integration and standardization should be reached within the context of the Living Labs? Which business models are potentially sustainable in the long term within the perspective of balancing the Living Labs economic profitability and social inclusiveness? How OAN may support the development of users’ co-creation in the Living Lab environment? How OAN can impact growth and employment? How can OAN help bridging the digital divide? The objective of this research is to respond to these research questions and, as a result, provide a policy framework for the Living Labs wide implementation as a pillar of a European Innovation System in the context of the renewed Lisbon Strategy.

EXPECTED IMPACT

The implementation of complex technology-enabled infrastructures to support large scale Living Labs calls for a broader approach where social and cultural aspects as well as new business models are integrated in early design phases to mitigate uncertainties of networked infrastructures, such as sustainability, flexibility and scalability.

Open Access Networks (OAN) will enable networked test beds for the deployment of Living Labs in peripheral and remote areas, providing low-cost ubiquitous (wire-line and wire-less) broadband for public and private (business and residential) uses in underserved geographies with the objectives of stimulating user-driven innovation and offering relevant content and services to local communities.





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It may be also expected that the OAN architecture may create the necessary competitive environment where innovative content and services will flourish with positive impacts on bridging the digital divide, strengthening of social networks, local entrepreneurship and user-driven innovation. The results may be used as a toolkit by Living Labs and supporting communities of creation which aim to improve the quality of life, increase business competitiveness and encourage open innovation through the deployment of broadband.

FUNDING SCHEMES

FP7 Capacities programme (2008)/ Research Infrastructure.

6.4 Thematic networks for harmonisation

6.4.1 TOWARDS KEY THEMATICALLY STRUCTURED LIVING LABS

Living Labs can be a critical tool to stimulate innovation and widespread adoption in specific domains. It is therefore recommended to identify or set up key Living Labs that have an explicit focus on a certain domain (space technologies, mobility, media, e-health,…)

With regard to the domain of e-health – e.g. one of the iLab-O key domains - exemplary Living Lab projects, infrastructures and toolboxes should be set up, monitored and evaluated in order to tailor Living Labs to the specific characteristics of the e-health domain. The focus of an e-health Living Lab is not primarily on the efficiency of medical treatment. This is an evaluation to be made by a health professional, and not by the Living Lab. Therefore medical professionals need to participate as stakeholders in the Living Lab. Rather, the focus should be on the (often indirect) dynamics and impacts that e-health applications can have on the overall quality of life of people, patients and care takers. This should be extensively monitored and measured in real-life circumstances.

Important R&D challenges for e-health Living Labs are to extend their attention towards the changes in the care process, in the workflow for caretakers (professionals and non-professionals) and in the healthcare value chain. Also, ample attention should be paid to the cost-effectiveness combining operational and technical costs, taking into account third party payment models, and including health insurance companies and service deliverance companies as stakeholders in the Living Lab. A new e-health Living Lab approach should also take into account fundamental changes in target markets, such as a shift from specific patient groups towards non- or multi-pathology based groups (in case of cure-related applications) and even towards the general public (in case of care and prevention-related applications).

What is needed: Some key thematically structured Living Labs on European scale have to be identified related to specific themes (policy, user, technology,…) and domains (e-health, urban technologies, e-inclusion, automotive, space,…). In relation to this approach new Living Lab methodologies to be developed and evaluated in empirical, large scale and multi-stakeholder settings.

STATUS OF EUROPEAN LIVING LABS

Generally speaking, we can allocate the European Living Labs into three basic groups:

Mature Living Labs, or the real success stories of the pan-European movement, started several years ago and holding a successful track record of activities;

Maturing Living Labs, or the fastest movers to this respect, that were initiated later or in parallel and are now showing a promising scorecard of results;





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Beginners, a sort of a “bridge” built between the 1st and the 2nd/3rd wave of Living Labs, that were both late in their introduction and not so wealthy in terms of activities performed / results obtained.

The following diagram plots the 14 experiences assessed during the two subsequent surveys within the CoreLabs project; it is likely however that the group of “Beginners” may include additional 1st & now 2nd wave Living Labs that were not responding to our questionnaires.

Figure 05 Living labs status (assessment results)

The above diagram should not be intended in absolute terms, but as a reflection of the information gathering activities from the Living Labs contacted during the course of the evaluation study. Further documentation of past and current performances can lead to possible changes in the composition of each “cluster” of Living Labs, and the need for that should be stressed also in view of the harmonization and networking of existing experiences.

LIVING LABS DESIGN, STANDARDISATION AND CERTIFICATION

In light of the growing diffusion of Living Labs in European research, development and innovation infrastructure, it is worth focusing on the performance measurement approach for a successful take-up of Living Lab methodology.

More support is needed to the process of Living Labs design (for beginners), standardization (for maturing Living Labs) and certification (for the mature ones).

At each of these three levels, the theoretical and empirical apparatus developed in the referred study can prove useful, namely:





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At the design level, to clarify what are the necessary components of a new Living Lab, and in particular:

• the Owner

• the stakeholders

• the ICT infrastructure, solutions and tools

• the user-centric, co-creative validation approach

At the standardisation level, to analyse those operational aspects of a maturing Living Lab that may need further improvement, and in particular:

the extent of use of the “ideal”, 5-steps trial configuration methodology

• the quality and quantity of the reported results

• the comparison of performances by means the benchmarking indicators

At the certification level, to justify the reasons why a (mature) Living Lab can also deserve a recognition of “excellence”, with special respect to:

• the conformance to standards

• the five evaluation criteria of impact assessment

• the compliance with the “human factor” in a similar way as documented in our evaluation questionnaire1.

LIVING LAB METHODS/TOOLS/INFRASTRUCTURES

The extreme variation and heterogeneity of infrastructures, tools and methods currently employed and deployed by the examined Living Labs should not be considered per se as a topic of evaluation.

However, the two following aspects should be considered:

• the need for an underlying ICT infrastructure that can ensure, not just a stable connection from remote to the Living Labs members, but also an effective interaction and collaboration between the users;

• the potential of collaborative methods and tools, not only for their inherent level of innovation, but especially with respect to the efficiency (value for money) and efficacy / effectiveness of the trials, two very important components of the overall impact assessment exercise.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Based on an initial analysis of existing Living Labs, the Living Lab approach is proving successful and is being adopted by many different actors of European industry and society. The strength and potential of Living Labs and the benefits they can bring to European research, development and innovation are very promising and merit further investment.

There is a strong need to create a standardised, networked innovation framework, that is transferable to other RTD initiatives at a European level, whilst unifying disparate existing ones.





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Further work should focus at:

• The development of harmonised standards to benchmark the Living Labs performance, based on the methodology developed in the CoreLabs project ;

• The implementation of these Living Lab standards in a perspective of quality certification of procedures/methods/tools.

FUNDING SCHEMES

Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (2007-8), …

6.5 Application area specific approaches

FUNDING SCHEMES

DG INFSO H: (for eHealth, eInclusion, Transportation & Logistics), …

LIVING LAB THEMATIC/TOPIC SUB-NETWORKS

• Establish ENoLL sub-networks related to specific themes and topics (Health, Inclusion, Public transportation, Tourism etc)

6.6 Regional policy approaches

TARGET OUTCOME

“Innovation can enhance regional development and a regional approach can foster good innovation”, said Commissioner Hübner, the European Commissioner for Regional Policy, in her common press conference of 13th of September with Commissioner Potocnik, the European Commissioner for Research. ”The capacity of those making decisions about their regions to turn knowledge into growth will have a decisive impact on the future. So we need to use all means that we have to make this positive relationship between regions and research flourish.”

The EU has complementary policies in place to support research, innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe's regions and Member States. Providing the basis of excellent research and innovation in Europe is the precondition for maintaining the EU model of sustainable development. Cohesion policy can help all regions to build up research and innovation capacity, to stimulate and support innovations in the social area, and to exchange good practice through trans-national and inter-regional co-operation

The Commission on 13 July.2007 adopted two key proposals in order to help national and regional authorities make the most efficient use of the €308 billion EU money that was allocated to Cohesion policy under the December 2005 budgetary deal for 2007-2013. This comes only days after the European Parliament vote on the package of regulations that will govern Structural Funds operation from January 2007. The Commission invites Member States to improve the arrangements for coordinated preparation and use of the Structural Funds, FP7 and CIP and to include information on these in the National Reform Programmes.





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Complementing the regulations, the Community Strategic Guidelines are prepared by the Commission to set out the political priorities for investments to be made at national and regional level. Emphasizing investments in knowledge and information society, innovation, entrepreneurship, the environment and "creating more and better jobs," the Community Strategic Guidelines play a crucial role in "lisbonising" the future Cohesion policy. The guide is due to be published by the end of the year.

The DG Regio communicated also by his report recently to find synergies in the EU programmes that support regional development through research, development and innovation: the Structural Funds, the Seventh Framework Programme for R&D (FP7) and the Competitiveness & Innovation Programme (CIP).

EXPECTED IMPACT

To facilitate complementary funding from Community, national and regional instruments, the Commission will regularly inform national/regional authorities on organizations established in their respective territories which have benefited from FP7 and CIP grants. Such information will be provided via the existing governance structures set out for each of these instruments.

The European Commission is also planning a series of actions to help Member States and regions make better use of funding. By the end of the year, the Commission will produce a guide to help research organisations and businesses identify the most appropriate source of funding.

The Commission will hold regular events bringing together the relevant stakeholders in research, innovation and regional development to share ideas and exchange best practice.

The Commission will report in spring 2009 on the progress made at national and regional level in co-ordinated use of the Community's instruments and on examples of good practice at national and regional level;

FUNDING SCHEMES

At the Community level, the Union possesses three key support instruments: • Cohesion policy which is funded under the Structural Funds • Cohesion Fund Research Framework Programme and • the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme.

This Communication aims to show the synergies of design of the funding instruments of the European research, innovation and cohesion policies. In order to increase the effectiveness of the three instruments, these synergies should now be translated into synergies of action by national and regional authorities as well as regional actors. The Communication takes stock of the current situation and calls on Member States and regions to make more effective use of the EU Research, Innovation and Cohesion policies and instruments.

The Commission will prepare by the end of 2007 a practical guide looking at the funding opportunities through the eyes of a research institution or a company wishing to use EU funding to undertake research and innovation activities. The guide will also examine how to set up mechanisms at national and regional levels to foster coordinated access to the different instruments, and explain Article 54(5) of the Council Regulation (EC) No 1083/2006 on the use of funding from two different Community sources for the same set of eligible costs;





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MAGNITUDE OF INVESTMENT NEEDED

Similarly, while Cohesion Policy does not set specific minimum allocations for RTDI, or indeed for any sector, both the Regulations and the Strategic Guidelines on Cohesion give a clear impetus to raise research and innovation capacity in the regions by funding productive investment together with help for initiating strategies for R&D and innovation based on local assets. Indicative figures are that Member States have "earmarked" around €45 billion of cohesion policy funding for investments in research and development and innovation, including investment in human capital. This is more than three times the amount that was invested in these areas in the period 2000-2006.

Outside the Convergence regions, the Regional Competitiveness and Employment objective aims at strengthening competitiveness and attractiveness, as well as employment, through a two-fold approach. First, development programmes will help regions to anticipate and promote economic change through innovation and the promotion of the knowledge society, entrepreneurship, the protection of the environment, and the improvement of their accessibility. Second, more and better jobs will be supported by adapting the workforce and by investing in human resources. In EU-27, a total of 168 regions will be eligible, representing 314 million inhabitants. Within these, 13 regions which are home to a total of 19 million inhabitants represent so-called “phasing-in” areas and are subject to special financial allocations due to their former status as “Objective 1” regions. The amount of EUR 55 billion – of which EUR 11.4 billion is for the “phasing-in” regions – represents just below 16% of the total allocation. Regions in 19 Member States are concerned with this objective.





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7 CONCLUSIONS

There are already environments for open innovation that generate strong business valid assets, particularly in terms of globally valuable products and content. There is a significant potential to further develop the principles of open innovation, in particular when it comes to generation of high-value, environmentally friendly and sustainable services and societal infrastructures.

Europe has several natural strengths for sustainable innovation such as our blend of cultures, high education level, global awareness/trust and emerging strong infrastructure for broadband and mobile communication. Leveraging on Europe’s natural strengths, European Network of Living Labs will facilitate open cross-border collaboration in private-public-people partnerships for development of methodology and systems for open human-centric innovation.

The European Network of Living Labs strategy includes: • New/Reinforced R&D on;

ICT for open collaborative innovation Methodology and IPR for openness and competitiveness Principles for cross-border trust based private-public-people partnerships Green Innovation - Humanity-centric policies for inclusion and global sustainability

• European Network of Living Labs top level governance and strategic planning should be supervised by European Presidencies (circulating) in order to reassure long term independence of any singular private/public body or other power structure.





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8 REFERENCES

8.1 Abbreviations and Terminology

CA Coordination Action (FP type of project)

CoP Communities of Practice

CORE Continuity, Openness, Realism and Empowerment of users. section 0

DG Directorate-General (European Commission organisational entity), such as:

DG AGRI DG Agriculture and Rural Development

DG ENTR DG Enterprise and Industry

DG INFSO DG Information Society and Media

DG REGIO DG Regional Policy

DG RTD

DG Research

Domain A shared area of interest among Living Lab actors. There are different type of areas like: Application areas (automotive, eHealth, public transportation etc), geographical areas (Urban, Rural etc) or demographic areas (young people, elderly people, kids in school etc). Ref “LL Types” in section 0

EAR Experience and Application Research -> section 2.5

EC European Commission

ENoLL European Network of Living Labs /01/

FP EU Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP6 = 6th Framework Programme: 2003-2006; FP7 = 7th Framework Programme: 2007-2013, etc)

Innovation An asset or asset generation process, which has a well defined and recognized value and is an evidence of significant novelty and creativity.

IP (1) Integrated Project (FP type of project). (2) Internet Protocol

ISV Independent Software Vendors

LL Living Lab

LL-Open Living Labs Open Innovation Community /01/

Living Lab A Living Lab is a system enabling people, users/buyers of services and products, to take active roles as contributors and co-creators in the research, development and innovation process.

LLP Living Labs Portfolio, including ENoLL, LL-Open, emerging LL Partner Network, and LL related projects section 4.1

LLP-LG Living Labs Portfolio Leadership Group section 5.1.5

OAN Open Access Networks

OCA Open Collaborative Architectures





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SSA Strategic Support Action (FP type of project)

UDI User-driven Innovation

User An individual person who works with, is beneficiary of or otherwise depends on the innovation being created in a Living Lab. Users includes individuals in many different roles along the innovation value chain such as; inventors, developers, (re)sellers, providers, buyers, customers and end users.

8.2 Publications

[01] Aho, Cornu, Georghiou, Subirá; “Creating an Innovative Europe”, ”Report of the Independent Expert Group on R&D and Innovation appointed following the Hampton Court Summit”, January 2006

[02] Project CoreLabs; ”D2.1a - Best Practise Report” Version 1.1, January 2007

[03] Project CoreLabs; ”D2.2 - Impact Analysis and Synnergy Report” Version 1.2, September 2007

[04] Project CoreLabs; ”D5.1 - Metods&Tools, Inventory&Taxonomy” Version 0.5, October 2006

[05] Ballon, P., Pierson, J., & Delaere, S. (2005). ”Test and Experimentation Platforms For Broadband Innovation: Examining European Practice”. In: Conference Proceedings of 16th European Regional Conference, International Telecommunications Society (ITS), Porto, Portugal, 4-6 September, 2005.

[06] Mulder, I. (2004). ”Understanding designers, designing for understanding”. Enschede, The Netherlands, Telematica Instituut.

[07] Mulder, I., Fahy, C., Hribernik, K., Velthausz, D., Feurstein, K., Garcia, M., Schaffers, H., Mirijamdotter, A., & Stahlbrost, A. (in press). ”Towards harmonized methods and tools for Living Labs”. Forthcoming in Proceedings of eChallenges 2007. Paper to be presented at e-Challenges 2007, 24 - 26 October 2007, The Hague, The Netherlands.

[08] ISTAG report on EAR “Involving users in the development of ambient intelligence”. IST Research Content, September 2004. http://www.cordis.lu/ist/istag.htm

[09] Tapscott, Williams. “Wikinomics”. http://www.wikinomics.com

[10] Merz, Flügge et al - SAP Research. ”The added value of Living Labs – a software industry perspective”, Input for the Living Labs Roadmap Version: 0.2

[11] Hans Schaffers, Implementation of the Rural Living Labs: Integration, Results M1-M12, Outlook M13-M36, 2nd review of C@R, 18th October 2007, Brussels

[12] Flügge, B., & Schmidt, A. (2006): Challenges of Interoperability and e-enabled Collaboration scenarios in an ecosystem in forthcoming Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology 2nd Edition, Hershey PA, USA.

[13] Wikipedia, retrieved February 12, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Access_Network

[14] ING, (2006) “European telecoms. CityNet Amsterdam: Fibre-to-the-home is becoming a reality”, retrieved on December 12, from http://www.ftthcouncil.org/documents/736808.pdf.





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[15] Oliveira, A., Caires, R., Fradinho, E., Barbosa, A., and Kalla, T., “Madeira Island Living Lab Rural Domain”, in proceedings of e-Challenges 2006 conference, Barcelona, 2006.

[16] Ingrid Mulder, Walter Bohle, Shela Boshomane, Lara Marques, Chris Morris, Hugo Tempelman, & Daan Velthausz (under review). Real-world Innovation in Rural South Africa. Submitted manuscript.

[17] Hippel, von, E. (2005): Democratizing Innovation, ISBN-10: 0262002744, The MIT Press

8.3 Internet Places

/01/ European Network of Living Labs - Network of systems/environments for open user-driven research, development and innovation - http://www.openlivinglabs.eu

/02/ Innocentive - Help to find competence, exchange ideas and market innovations http://www.innocentive.com

/03/ NineSigma - Help to accelerate innovation - http://www.ninesigma.com

/04/ Open Living Labs Sweden - LivingLabs network in Sweden - http://www.openlivinglabs.se

/05/ yet2.com - Help to identify and capture the full value of your intellectual assets - http://www.yet2.com





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AUTHORS SUPPLEMENT

Changes since last version (0.7a):

Chapt/Sect Change

Executive Summary

Initial content written

1 New intro text: Sub section ”Networked environment”

2.4 New intro text: Sub Section “Open Access Networked as a key underlying infrastructure

Change one of the components of the infrastructure view of the harmonization cube

3. Chapter level 2 removed

5.2 Info about Dutch network added

6.1 Reworked with new material

6.2 Partly reworked with new material

6.3 Partly reworked with new material

7 Content established

8. Chapter “References” restructured

8.3 Section “Internet places” added

Authors Supplement

New chapter, to be removed in final Roadmap issue (part of old chapter 8)

3.7 Partly Reworked with new material

3.8 Partly reworked with new material (content for needs and challenges added)

3.9 Content established

All chapters Proof Reading and minor improvements

Writing Guidelines

All members of the Living Labs Open Innovation Community can, and are encouraged to, submit amendments, in order to make document comprehensive and keep it up-to-date.

Initial document establishment will run Oct.-Dec.2007. During this period, new versions will be issued every second week (normally Wednesday, odd numbered weeks). In order to be processed in time for a new issue, submissions should be available three working days before next issue date (Sunday evening).

Draft issues are planned for (2007): Oct.24, Nov.7 and Nov.21

First main issue is planned for 15 Dec.2007.





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HOW TO GET ACCESS

Self-registration to the AMI@Work Living Lab Open Innovation Community is publicly available here http://www.ami-communities.eu [Register to join] or directly http://www.ami-communities.eu/pub/bscw.cgi/?op=regami and existing Ami@Work Community users that have not yet joined the Living Labs Open Innovation Community can easily do so here: http://www.ami-communities.eu/bscw/bscw.cgi?op=regami&mode=get_user_details&target=communities&home=/bscw/bscw.cgi/306354 [Log-In, join the Living Labs Community, click Back or access the link to the Roadmap: http://www.ami-communities.eu/bscw/bscw.cgi/306354 ]

TO START

Use latest version of the document as basis (baseline) for your contribution/amendment. Latest version is available in: http://www.ami-communities.eu/bscw/bscw.cgi/306354

HOW TO WRITE

Be short and concise. Only add information that “adds value”.

Please do not add big tables/images or many pages of information into a single section

Use the character/paragraph formats already pre-defined in this document. ( MS Word Help on “Styles and Formatting” ).

Make your amendments in the appropriate existing chapter/section structure. Only add a new chapter/section, if you have a strong opinion it is needed.

HOW TO COMMENT

Do not use MS Word functionality for comments. To insert a comment, please write your comment as normal text paragraph(s) and then apply style “Comment” to the paragraph(s).

HOW TO SUBMIT

When finished, save the file in your computer with filename supplemented with your initials: Example: LL_Roadmap_0v6a_Draft_MichaelB (Michael Boronowsky)

Submit your file into the BSCW folder structure; http://www.ami-communities.eu/bscw/bscw.cgi/306354 - in the following way:

For each chapter/section you have amended: - store the document in the BSCW folder/sub-folder matching the amended chapter/section Yes! – It is OK (and desired) that you store same document file in several BSCW folders/sub-folders, if you have amended several chapters/sections.

If you cant find a BSCW folder/subfolder, matching the chapter/section you have amended: - Store the document in the BSCW folder nearest above (or top-folder: “Living Labs Roadmap…”)

Living Labs Roadmap 2007-2010

Documents

Transcript of Living Labs Roadmap 2007-2010