The Living Lab as a Methodology for Public Administration Research: a Systematic Literature Review of its Applications in the Social Sciences

Social Innovation Living Lab as a Methodology for Conceptual Design Research

“…While studying the scientific literature, it is found that design is gaining popularity as an innovation approach to address complex social problems (Bason, 2010;van der Bijl-Brouwer et al, 2015;Baran, 2018;Dekker et al, 2019). At the same time, the literature review has revealed the significant lack of research studies on social innovation and especially the processes of its generating.…”

“…Given the specificity of social innovations, we need novel methods and tools for researching and designing such interventions that take into account social changes that they cause in real life situations. One of such proposals is the living lab methodology, which can be adapted for the needs of researching and designing social innovations (Leminen et al, 2012;Dekker et al, 2019). Along with the digital revolution there is observed an increased tendency to extend the research processes beyond the limitations of the closed laboratories towards the real-life settings (Coorevits et al, 2018).…”

“…Given the specificity and importance of social innovations presented above, we need methods and tools for researching and designing social innovations that take into account social changes that they cause in real social situations. One of such proposals is the living labs methodology, increasingly used in a public sector (Dekker et al, 2019), which can be adapted for the needs of researching and designing social innovations. Therefore, the next section presents the living lab concept.…”

“…While reviewing the scientific literature on living labs, this concept was found still in the initial stage of development (Eriksson et al, 2005;Følstad, 2008;Klimowicz, 2015;Keyson et al, 2017;Dekker et al, 2019). The concept of living labs originates from Professor William Mitchell at MIT.…”

“…(1) being a research and development process of innovation, (2) being a collaboration between multiple stakeholders, (3) taking place in a real-life setting, (4) involving users as co-creators (Dekker et al, 2019). Building upon explored research studies, they define "living labs are a research and design methodology applied by research institutes in cooperation with public and private partners for developing and testing innovations in co-creation with users in real-life settings" (Dekker et al, 2019, p. 5).…”