Applying an RRI Filter in Key Learning on Urban Living Labs’ Performance

Abstract

Urban living labs is a practical methodology in improving sustainability in cities by facilitating collaborative learning and innovation in a real-life environment, thereby mainly responding to the needs of users (citizens). The paper aims to filter a list of key learnings on urban living labs through the lens of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). One of the motivations is that key learnings on urban living labs are mainly derived from means-goal effectiveness (MGE) thinking while the urban setting calls for a broader perspective due to complexity and tension from the multi-actor, multifunctional, and multi-scalar character of cities. The filtering reveals almost 40 learnings as 'overlap' and 'exclusive for MGE'. Importantly, five learnings are identified as specific for RRI and potentially enriching living lab methodology: ethical and normative principles like health, safety, security, and equality between societal groups, and a wider distribution of benefits and risks of living lab outcomes, in particular, contradictory sustainability issues. The RRI filtering causes three practical implications: coping with uneven power distribution between stakeholders, limited feasibility of applying the comprehensive learning framework, and challenges of overarching platform structures enabling to better incorporate RRI concerns in living lab methodology. The findings as presented in an adapted list are new, as RRI values and concerns have seldom been applied to practical innovation and have never been explicitly applied to urban living labs' performance beyond the borders of effectiveness thinking. Sustainability 2019, 11, 3833 2 of 16ICT-based innovations [17]. Since then, ENoLL membership has been granted to 440 historically recognized living labs (Appendix A).Application of living labs methodology is by no means everywhere the same. To date, the methodology has been used in practice with different emphasis on users' roles in finding solutions, prior definition of structure and processes and focus on exploration or exploitation of opportunities [1,18,19]. Furthermore, we mention differences in spatial and organizational scale: living lab methodology has been applied as small-scale physical experimentation spaces but also as networked spaces at regional scale that act as platforms for sets of experimentations using some sort of open innovation [20][21][22]. The common core of the methodology, however, has remained. This paper deals with urban living labs within a 'larger category' of living labs. What urban living labs distinguish, is indicated in the literature as follows: being localized or place-based; involvement of local government and local citizens; acting as locally involved public-private partnership; applying coproduction/co-creation with local actors; and typically dealing with urban sustainability problems [23][24][25][26][27][28]. Urban living labs may include various stages in innovation, running from ideation and experimentation to upscaling and application in practice/market. In urban practice toda...

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