The article highlights the significance of understanding success criteria by gathering data from key stakeholders associated with Basaksehir Living Lab, Bodrum Living Lab and Mezopotamya Living Lab ...via the in-depth interview method. These interviews aim to gain insights into how these living labs have addressed and incorporated the identified success criteria within their initiatives and to understand the impact and outcomes they have achieved in their respective contexts. The interviews reveal valuable insights and lessons learned that could inform the design and implementation of future lab initiatives. Furthermore, the findings contribute to the existing knowledge base on ULLs, shedding light on their potential to address urban challenges, foster collaboration, and drive sustainable urban development. However, there is a literature gap in terms of a comprehensive understanding of the success criteria specific to ULLs, which hinders the effective utilization of ULLs as platforms for addressing urban challenges. The conclusions drawn from the article emphasize the need for further examination of these labs' openness, user empowerment, and transferability criteria. Nevertheless, the article contributes to understanding the success criteria of ULLs and provides insights for future research and practice.
•Living Lab Triangle implemented in the KTH Live-In Lab building innovation platform.•A SWOT analysis underpins current strengths and weaknesses of the KTH Live-In Lab.•Empirical data shows that ...smart building living labs can be financially sustainable.•Identification of critical conditions to enact smart building demonstrators.•Thorough analysis, measurable results and transparent evaluation of a Living Lab.
The adoption of innovation in the building sector is currently too slow for the ambitious sustainability goals that our societies have agreed upon. Living labs are open innovation ecosystems in real-life environments using iterative feedback processes throughout a lifecycle approach of an innovation to create sustainable impact. In the context of the built environment, such co-creative innovation and demonstration platforms are needed to facilitate the adoption of innovative technologies and concepts for more energy-efficient and sustainable buildings. However, their feasibility is not extensively proven. This paper illustrates the implementation and demonstrates the feasibility of the Living Labs Triangle Framework for buildings living labs. This conceptual framework has been used to conceive the KTH Live-In Lab, a living lab for buildings. The goal of the Live-In Lab was to create a co-creative open platform for research and education bridging the gap between industry and academia, featuring smart building demonstrators. The Living Lab Triangle Framework has been deployed to meet the goals of the Live-in Lab, and the resulting concept is described. This paper then analyses the methodological and operational results introducing performance metrics to measure the economic sustainability, the promotion of multidisciplinary research and development projects, dissemination and impact. The results are completed with a SWOT analysis identifying its current strengths and weaknesses. The results collected in this work fill a missing gap in the scientific literature on the performance of living labs and provide empirical evidence on the sustainability and impact of living labs.
The use of Nature-based Solutions (NBS), designed and implemented with participatory approaches, is rapidly increasing. Much use is being made of the Living Lab (LL) concept to co-create innovative ...NBS with stakeholders in a certain societal and environmental, real-life context. Most of the current research revolves around urban LLs, thus overlooking specificities of rural areas. Furthermore, the influence of the context itself on co-creation processes is insufficiently recognised, leaving challenges associated with co-creation such as stakeholder engagement unresolved. By exploring the co-creation processes in the LLs of the OPERANDUM project, this study identifies eighteen contextual factors shaping the co-creation processes of NBS within rural territories and provides associated recommendations. In addition, based on lessons learnt in the OPERANDUM project, we discuss the value of a relational place-based approach in LLs, suggesting that the co-creation process should be approached as a dynamic confluence of many interconnected contextual factors. We conclude that acknowledging the interconnections in co-creation in the real-life context of rural territories may increase the success and impact of the LL approach, and ultimately, the benefits of NBS.
•Better understanding of the essence and dynamics of “real life context” in the co-creation in the living labs is needed.•Real life context of a living lab is composed of factors that refer to ecological-physical, socio-economic, institutional, research and NbS context.•Co-creation of NbS in rural living labs differs from urban living labs.•Effective and inclusive co-creation for NbS requires relational and place-based approach with understanding of interrelated and dynamic contexts.
The organization of supported and sustainable urban interventions is challenging, with multiple actors involved, fragmented decision-making powers, and multiple values at stake. Globally, urban ...living labs have become a fashionable phenomenon to tackle this challenge, fostering the development and implementation of innovation, experimentation, and knowledge in urban, real-life settings while emphasizing the important role of participation and co-creation. However, although urban living labs could in this way help cities to speed up the sustainable transition, urban living lab experts agree that, in order to truly succeed in these ambitious tasks, the way urban living labs are being shaped and steered needs further research. Yet, they also confirm the existing variation and opaqueness in the definition of the concept. This article contributes to conceptual clarity by developing an operationalized definition of urban living labs, which has been used to assess 90 sustainable urban innovation projects in the city of Amsterdam. The assessment shows that the majority of the projects that are labelled as living labs do not include one or more of the defining elements of a living lab. In particular, the defining co-creation and development activities were found to be absent in many of the projects. This article makes it possible to categorize alleged living lab projects and distill the "true" living labs from the many improperly labelled or unlabelled living labs, allowing more specific analyses and, ultimately, better targeted methodological recommendations for urban living labs.
Examining change in business networks can illuminate how time, temporality and process unfold and engage different stakeholders in open innovation. Living labs are increasingly popular open ...innovation networks that provide a fruitful area in which to study change processes and their influencing factors in network dynamics. We adopt a longitudinal process perspective to analyze eight living labs focused on urban development in a Northern European city. Our analysis reveals six pertinent processes: (i) expansion, (ii) reinforcement, (iii) focusing, (iv) unification, (v) termination, and (vi) recurrence. These processes reflect change in networks characterized by diverse actors, the coexistence of individual and shared motives, a high degree of openness, and user involvement. The identified change processes are a result of living labs disclosing their needs, data, and operations to their stakeholders. We propose a theoretical concept, which we describe as “network boosters”, to illustrate the factors that foster change processes. Scholars and practitioners of innovation management can learn from these findings that understanding change in open innovation networks may help to depict and predict short- and long-term relationships, and it may assist them in managing innovation in open environments.
•A theoretical framework for studying change processes in business networks.•Six distinct change processes are identified in living lab open innovation networks.•Change processes are facilitated by network boosters.•Stakeholders disclose their needs, data, and operations for others in the network.
A living lab is a physical or virtual space in which to solve societal challenges, especially for urban areas, by bringing together various stakeholders for collaboration and collective ideation. ...Although the notion has received increasing attention from scholars, practitioners and policy makers, its essence remains unclear to many. We therefore performed a systematic literature review of a sample of 114 scholarly articles about living labs to understand the central facets discussed in the nascent literature. In particular, we explored the origin of the living lab concept and its key paradigms and characteristics, including stakeholder roles, contexts, challenges, main outcomes, and sustainability. While doing this, we discovered that the number of publications about living labs has increased significantly since 2015, and several journals are very active in publishing articles on the topic. The living lab is considered a multidisciplinary phenomenon and it encompasses various research domains despite typically being discussed under open and user innovation paradigms. What is more, the existing literature views living labs simultaneously as landscapes, real-life environments, and methodologies, and it suggests that they include heterogeneous stakeholders and apply various business models, methods, tools and approaches. Finally, living labs face some challenges, such as temporality, governance, efficiency, user recruitment, sustainability, scalability and unpredictable outcomes. In contrast, the benefits include tangible and intangible innovation and a broader diversity of innovation. Based on our analysis, we provide some implications and suggestions for future research.
Urban living labs (ULLs) are emerging as a form of collective urban governance and experimentation to address sustainability challenges and opportunities created by urbanisation. ULLs have different ...goals, they are initiated by various actors, and they form different types of partnerships. There is no uniform ULL definition. However, many projects studying and testing living lab methodologies are focusing on urban sustainability and low carbon challenges, as demonstrated by the current projects funded by the Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) Urban Europe. At the same time, there is no clear understanding of what the ultimate role of ULLs is in urban governance, and whether they represent a completely new phenomenon that is replacing other forms of participation, collaboration, experimentation, learning and governing in cities. There is a need to clarify what makes the ULL approach attractive and novel. The aim of this article is to develop current understandings through an examination of how the ULL concept is being operationalised in contemporary urban governance for sustainability and low carbon cities. This is undertaken through the analysis of academic literature complemented with five snapshot case studies of major ongoing ULL projects funded by JPI Urban Europe. Five key ULL characteristics are identified and elaborated: geographical embeddedness, experimentation and learning, participation and user involvement, leadership and ownership, and evaluation and refinement. The paper concludes by outlining a research agenda that highlights four key topics: ways in which the ULL approach is operationalised, the nature of ULL partnerships and the role of research institutions, the types of challenges addressed by different ULLs, and the role of sustainability and low carbon issues in framing ULLs.
•European cities face many sustainability challenges and opportunities.•Urban living labs (ULLs) are a form of collective urban governance to produce innovative solutions.•There is a need to clarify what makes the ULL approach attractive and novel and outline a research agenda.•We show how the ULL concept is operationalised in contemporary urban governance for sustainability and low carbon cities.•We analyse 5 ULL projects and 22 ULL examples to identify and systematise key ULL characteristics.
•Doing strategic urban experimentation in living labs brings about challenges and dilemmas.•A strategic niche management based framework is relevant for understanding challenges and dilemmas.•A key ...challenge is managing expectations about processes of strategic urban experimentation.•A key dilemma concerns the researchers’ position as both distant observer and agent of change.•Hence, transdisciplinary reflexivity is essential to the strategic urban experimentation approach.
Living labs have emerged as a form of strategic urban experimentation in sustainability transitions governance among policy makers and researchers. Limited attention has been given to the various challenges and dilemmas when doing LLs in relation to enabling urban transitions. This paper unpacks 16 challenges and dilemmas that arise for different actors in the process of living lab experimentation. The paper combines theoretical insights from Strategic Niche Management literature and insights from transdisciplinary research on living labs with empirical data from a qualitative case study analysis of four cycling innovation living labs in the Netherlands. By contrasting challenges and dilemmas identified in literature and those derived from our data, we reflect on key gaps between conceptual aspirations and empirical realities of strategic urban experimentation in sustainability transitions.
Urban Living Labs (ULL) are considered spaces to facilitate experimentation about sustainability solutions. ULL represent sites that allow different urban actors to design, test and learn from ...socio-technical innovations. However, despite their recent proliferation in the European policy sphere, the underlying processes through which ULL might be able to generate and diffuse new socio-technical configurations beyond their immediate boundaries have been largely disregarded and it remains to be examined how they contribute to urban sustainability transitions. With this study, we contribute to a better understanding of the diffusion mechanisms and strategies through which ULL (seek to) create a wider impact using the conceptual lens of transition studies. The mechanisms of diffusion are investigated in four distinct ULL in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and Malmö, Sweden. The empirical results indicate six specific strategies that aim to support the diffusion of innovations and know-how developed within ULL to a broader context: transformative place-making, activating network partners, replication of lab structure, education and training, stimulating entrepreneurial growth and narratives of impact.
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