Community Living Lab as a Collaborative Innovation Environment

Abstract

A Living Lab is a new way to deal with community-driven innovation in real-life contexts. The Living Lab concept is fuelled by knowledge sharing, collaboration and experimenting in open real environments. This research explores the sustainable development of community Living Labs within a South African context. The members of rural communities need sustainable development support in order to create jobs and alleviate poverty. In order to do so they need an open multidisciplinary research and systems thinking support environment which is facilitated in the Living Lab environment. The Living Lab approach provides its user group with an opportunity to develop a much deeper understanding of how the various components in their functional environment operate and interrelate. In the research community the Living Lab concept seems to be gaining increasing acceptance as a way to deal with innovation and to get insight into the innovation process. Several Living Labs are currently connected in a network of Living Labs, both in Europe and in South Africa aiming to share best practices and lessons learned. Creating an innovative software based management model for Living Labs for the greater South African region is also part of the research objectives. This paper presents two interrelated frameworks for the establishment of a Living Lab within a South African context. The paper also highlights the important role of holistic Systems thinking in a Living Lab environment.

Stakeholders involvement for energy conscious communities: The Energy Labs experience in 10 European communities

“…The Living Lab concept was initially developed and applied by William J. Mitchell, Kent Larson, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [18] that understood its great methodological value to try, validate, refine and implement prototypes and complex solutions in a real life context [19].…”

The Living Lab as a Tool to Promote Residents’ Participation in Destination Governance

“…The Characteristics and Design cluster of LL collects three subclusters, although these articles share a focus on user-driven innovation. Some of them discuss the collaboration and cooperation in a city context [141], others in a university context [106]. Closely related are concepts such as co-creation [142] and citizen empowerment [25,138].…”

“…The motives of the stakeholders to take part in an LL are seldom defined. LLs can help public authorities and companies to (1) get in touch with the community or a specific target group [139,142] in order to meet their needs with new products or services [141], (2) gather information and (3) detect impulses for innovations; LLs can help individual participants to (4) represent a certain position within the discussions at the L; for processes at a regional level, LLs can help one to (5) balance the interests between local demands and further target groups [143]. For the case of company-driven living labs, Leminen et al (2017) [144] state that mainly short-term objectives are relevant, which could probably be in opposition to LLs that target central development issues in a city context.…”

“…innovation support, including idea generation [143], knowledge transfer [26,141], facilitating user tests [156], and performance improvement [141]; 2.…”

“…well-being and sustainability, including social innovation [136], the creation of prosperous communities [141], the transition to more sustainable lifestyles [103], or sustainability thinking [141,144].…”