Maurice Mulvenna, University of Ulster
ENRICHING THE RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT PROCESS USING LIVING LAB METHODS: THE TRAIL EXPERIENCE
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A University of Ulster Innovation Lab
Outline
• TRAIL • Triple helix • (e)Challenges • Northern Ireland • The case studies • User-driven methods • Governance • The issues • Concluding remarks
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TRAIL
• Interdisciplinary • Open • Participative • User-focused
Triple Helix Instantiation
Challenges
• Inter-disciplinarity • Sustainability • User-centered – Balance design versus engineering – Avoiding technological determinism
• Interoperability • Service evolution • Business models • Ethics
Relevance to NI
• Living Lab – Lessens risk in innovation – Speeds up innovation – Captures real needs at the beginning of the process – New sources of innovation
• Using Lead users – Those that very quickly understand the innovation problem
and articulate their needs because they have acute and latent needs
– Ensure higher validity, manage drop-out rates/motivation levels, buy-in and overall can carry out more efficient iterations
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Public sector jobs in Northern Ireland
8 Reserved functions include the Northern Ireland Office, Police Service of Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Prison Service, UK Central Government and UK Public Corporations.
Public sector differential
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TRAIL activities
• Vision: – Develop participative methods that identify the unmet health-
related needs of ageing, rural dwellers of Northern Ireland and the border counties of Ireland as they age in place
• Early stage innovation activities encompassing: – Ideation – Early research and development, supported by external
funders, in many inter-related areas.
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Ageing Northern Ireland
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Case study examples
• Night-time telecare-based support for people with dementia
• Wetness alert sensors for urinary incontinent people with dementia
• Cross-border telecare services • Developing interfaces for users with brain injuries • Community-orientated models for independent living
and ageing in place • Supporting people with dementia during daytime • Socially including younger people • Developing services for older people
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TRAIL Case Study Descriptions Characteristic user Identifying users Identifying needs Evaluating innovation
Person with early stage dementia
Health and welfare organisation
Face-to-face interviews with people with dementia and their carers
Medium scale trials with small numbers of users
Incontinent person with dementia
Health and welfare organisation
Lead user ‘proxy’ Short scale trials with small numbers of users
Elderly, rural dwellers Health and welfare organisation
Face-to-face meetings and workshops
Medium scale trials with medium number of users
People with brain injuries Health and welfare service provider
Lead user / small scale workshops for people with brain injuries and their carers
Small scale trials with small number of users
Elderly people Local council / health and welfare organisation
Region-based surveys of older people / workshops
Bespoke ‘wellness service model’ assessment
People with early stage dementia
Health and welfare organisation
Workshops and interviews with the people with dementia and the carer
Short to medium scale trials with medium numbers of users
Young people, often with self-image issues
Second-level educational institutes
Face-to-face meetings / small scale workshops
Uptake of third level educational courses
Elderly people Local council / health and welfare organisation
Medium scale workshops / users provided with idea capture toolkit
Long scale trials with medium numbers of users
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Methods and tools used in user-driven product or service processes
• Ideation with Lead Users • Participatory Design / User Design /
Co-Design
• Creativity Groups (face to face or online)
• Suggestion Box (virtual or real)
• Concept Tests with Lead Users • Cultural probes
• Ethnographic techniques
• (Virtual) product/prototype usability test (with test group/ lead users)
• Cognitive Walkthroughs
• Hierarchical value models
• Dialogism
• Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
• Interviews (face to face, online or telephone)
• Workshops with customers
• Focus Group Interviews (face to face or online)
• Market Intelligence Services
• Log behaviour of users/customers/ social network analysis
• Market Test • Time-motion-studies (controlled-,
direct- or field observation)
• Web surveys
• Talk Aloud
• Most memorable experiences
• Grounded theory
Methods and tools used in user-driven product or service processes
• Communities of Practice (COP)
• Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)
• Seeding, Evolutionary growth, Reseeding (SER) model
• Wizard of Oz experiment
• Workshop techniques, e.g., Thinking hats, World Cafe
Steering Committee
Interdisciplinary group (arts, computer science, engineering, health, business, sociology…) of
university researchers
Conception R&D Evaluation
Information escalation
• ~ 10 forums per year with partners (other research teams, associations, health and social, partners, industrialists…)
• Past experiences
Activities and actors
Deliverables Project proposals (~5 adopted every year)
Researchers
Health and social
mediators
10-15 end-users per workshop
Workshops (discussions and collection of end
users impressions for about 2 hours, every 3 months during the
project)
Questionnaires, minutes, and audio/video
recordings
Evaluation
Formal methodologies have been tested in the
past (eg. ANOVA, STOF) but they have yet to be adapted to the Living Lab’s needs. There is a need for a more
systematic methodology.
• Health and social interventions (associations, clinics, …) in contact with the users
• Researchers
Qualitative evaluations
Meeting Minutes (1 per project per year)
Governance
Issues
• Working with vulnerable users; • Managing the tension between users needs and
advancing the state of the art; • Informing and educating the regional government to
the benefits of citizen involvement; and • Addressing problems inherent in inter-disciplinary
working
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Working with vulnerable users
• Ensure that the living lab: – Interacts with vulnerable people in an equitable manner, – Respecting their needs and wishes ethically, – Adheres to relevant legislative provision in the field of ethics, – All stakeholder organisations who are responsible for
managing adherence to ethical guidelines do so
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Managing the tension between users needs and advancing the state of the
art • Balance of the management of innovation activities. • Majority of activities funded with support from
European and national research and development grants.
• The lab focuses on the early innovation stages: ideation, connection and evaluation;
• degree of ‘user-driven-ness’ v. state-of-the-art advancement.
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Informing and educating the regional government to the benefits of citizen
involvement • Managing the difficulty experienced in embedding the
living lab into the community in the North of Ireland • The bedding down of the living lab into the community
is strategically important. • Forming long-term linkages with local government and
related municipal organisations, against a backdrop of political uncertainty at both regional and local municipal levels.
• There is also evidence in the Northern Ireland region, that there is a related issue arising from a pre-disposition against risk-taking and openness to fresh thinking in innovation. 20
Addressing problems inherent in inter-disciplinary working
• Practical problems in fostering inter-disciplinary research between different areas of expertise, for example, computing and health sciences.
• “Those whose work becomes more interdisciplinary feel that they are losing their peer group.” – Linda Katehi, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Such human factors were one of the main barriers to inter-disciplinarity.”
• This has been experienced in our living lab as external pressure force academics into ‘discipline silos’.
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Concluding remarks…
• Significant body of academic research that supports the premise that user-driven innovation creates value in markets and for society.
• The network of living labs in Europe has been created, partly based upon this premise
• But it can be argued that there is a lack of evidence that demonstrates how such living labs articulate their value proposition, and
• How they carry out activities on the ground to work with users to create the added valued inherent in early innovation processes.
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Concluding remarks…
• How to work across EU, national, regional and city/council level
• How to provide (e-) services that reach people’s daily lives…
• …using supporting philosophies like ‘libertarian paternalism’
• Mayor of Stockholm: – “If we combine ICT for Growth with Democratic goals, then
blend will be valuable” - Stockholm 2007
…THANKS