As a practice-driven phenomenon, the Living Lab paradigm is constantly evolving and the concept, methods and tools are being constantly renewed. Whilst maintaining the same principles and foundations, such as user and citizen involvement, open innovation, value co-creation, real-life experimentation and multi-stakeholder and multidisciplinary collaboration, Living Labs are moving from controlled experiments towards large scale pilots for early adoption and deployment.
A Living Lab is not only a real-life research platform. A Living Lab is an innovation instrument that places the citizen at the center of innovation and can better mold opportunities offered by new ICT concepts and solutions to specific needs and aspirations of local contexts, cultures, and creative potentials.
Similarly to local innovation ecosystems, cities and regions have recognised the benefits and driving force of citizen-driven innovation as well, thus their urban platforms and ecosystems are also joining the Living Lab large-scale pilot movement. The aim is to engage a broad audience and include a relevant number of cross-border end users and stakeholders in the experimentations helping to lower barriers, speed up early adoption and facilitate a smooth transition to deployment. These actions enable projects to be sufficient to ensure statistical significance in impact analysis.
Citizen-driven cities who are embracing a bottom-up approach, co-creation and real-life experimentation, such as the finalists of the European Capital of Innovation Award 2016 (Eindhoven, Amsterdam, Berlin etc.), respond to the real needs of end-users (their citizens) inspired by specific real-life scenarios. These cities and regions can provide a trusted public, private and citizen-driven collaboration ecosystems to support and compliment the co-creation process of citizen-driven products and services. In a more ICT related context, local and regional open innovation ecosystems, similarly lab of labs, offer their open technologies, open service platforms and their open data to serve and speed up digital social innovation.
In this process ENoLL is committed to supporting the cities and regions who are developing pan-European and cross-border prototyping and experimentation environments based on the Digital Single Market.
In order to strengthen the societal and economical impact of the results of co-creation and large scale pilot validations in real-life, ENoLL is actively present in joint initiations to develop further the methodology, tools and challenges, in addition to disseminating widely the outputs and lessons learned gained through the above-mentioned experimentations.
Believing in the force of the network of networks, we are glad to announce that ENoLL recently joined the AIOTI community (Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation Online Community) and looks forward to collaborating with other organisations over the coming months.