The Living Lab approach within the multi-year integrated project ECOSPACE focused on community building and active user involvement in the process of developing, introducing and evaluating new collaboration concepts and tools. This paper reports about implementing and evaluating our adapted Living Labs framework to facilitate innovation in collaborative work environments to enhance professional communities. The pursued implementation approach is considered as a strategy for innovation, change and adoption. We use a perspective of socio-technical systems to explain the change-catalyzing role of our framework and findings
Innovation is rapidly becoming a strategic priority, but there is a large gap between the perceived importance of innovation and the effectiveness and appropriateness of approaches and methods used to systematically support and accelerate innovation. This paper presents results and conclusions from a new Idea Management concept that has been developed, introduced and tested in two company-wide idea campaigns in a Norwegian consulting company. This Idea Management concept is based on a life-cycle perspective on innovation, where the aim is to support all phases from insight to post-implementation learning and feedback. The overall concept is described, and comparative analyses of the two idea campaigns and three different Idea Management categories are provided together with conclusions and recommendations for companies interested in improving their Idea Management practices.
The ECOSPACE Integrated Project has developed an advanced collaborative workspace platform for eProfessionals. The technologies, services and collaboration tools have been developed, integrated and validated in various living labs addressing different contexts of eProfessional working. This paper reports about the Living Lab for Professional Communities of Innovation and covers three different user environments where innovative tools, services and practices have been experimented in different experimental settings. The first setting addresses the support of new work and collaboration practices in professional education. The second setting focuses on collaboration among business and research partners in promoting regional innovation. The third setting is about collaborative innovation in virtual communities. In the three settings, different user communities have adopted and experimented different sets of collaboration services. The paper presents the living lab methodology designed to launch, operate and monitor the different innovation and validation settings. Based on a cross-comparison of results and a longitudinal analysis, conclusions are drawn regarding the effectiveness of innovation services and collaborative platform, strategies to involve users and building user communities, and the effectiveness of the living labs methodology.
Abstract. The living labs approach within ECOSPACE focuses on early user community building and active user involvement in the process of developing, testing and evaluating new collaboration concepts and tools. This paper reports about implementing and evaluating the living labs approach to facilitate innovation in collaborative work environments to enhance professional communities. The living lab approach is considered as a strategy for innovation, change and adoption. The perspective of socio-technical systems is used to understand and explain the change-catalyzing role of the living lab approach.
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