VITALISE project invites all Living Lab professionals, enthusiasts, students and researchers to join the Summer School. It will take place between 6-7 July 2022 in Athens, Greece. The course participation will be free!

About the VITALISE Summer School

The VITALISE Summer School aims to provide researchers worldwide effective training both on how to implement the Living Lab methodology in their studies, as well as involve living labs Research Infrastructures and their services in their Health and Wellbeing research studies.

Researchers in the Health and Wellbeing domain will have the opportunity to learn more about the open innovation and Living Lab tools, methods and services to improve their research and follow new scientific paths thanks to the support of the VITALISE high-experienced trainers on the Living Lab methodology.

Participants will be also invited to access the VITALISE ICT tools and infrastructure within the project open calls to collaborate on scientific research with Living Labs recognized and labelled by the European Network of Living Labs.

The VITALISE Summer School is jointly organised and co-located with the School As Living Labs (SALL) / FOODSHIFT Summer School 2022. The “Schools as Sites for Food System Transformation” Summer School aims to familiarise participants with the concepts and methods of open schooling and living labs, providing a framework for educators and other societal actors to engage, discuss and explore how schools can become innovation incubators and accelerators within their local communities while offering new learning opportunities to their students.

Outcomes for the VITALISE Summer School participants

Participants to the VITALISE Summer School will take advantage from networking and peer to peer learnings with highly experienced trainers from the Living Lab community, as well as have the opportunity to create a complete roadmap to develop their research works by implementing the Living Lab methodology, with the support and guidance of the VITALISE trainers.

The VITALISE Summer School will include:

• 5 hours in total of expert lecturers.
• 5 hours of hands-on workshops to improve your research.
• 1 hour inspirational interaction with representatives of projects where living labs where involved.
• All materials and equipment needed for the course.
• Catering (lunches and coffee breaks offered by the VITALISE Summer School).
• A Social Programme & organization of excursions (e.g. visit to the Acropolis Museum and farewell dinner, etc. Costs for these additional and not mandatory activities will be covered by participants)

Registrations and further information

The participation to VITALISE Summer School is free of charge for all the participants enrolled. Accommodation and excursions are not covered by VITALISE. The participation in the summer school do not require any prior experience or knowledge with Living Lab methodologies. The school is addressed to both experiences and early stage researchers.

Please register to the event here. Registrations will close on 6 June 2022. When we will reach the 30 participants, we will close the registrations, so please enrol soon.

Agenda of the VITALISE Summer School

The venue

The Summer School will be held at Golden Coast Hotel & Bungalows, an A-class/ 4-star sea-side hotel which stretches on the golden, sandy beach of the Marathon Bay, near the historic location of Marathon, at the outskirts of Athens.

Participants are expected to arrive through the Athens International Airport, approximately 25 km (15,53 miles) distance from the hotel.

VITALISE has made special arrangements with the hotel to all participants of the Summer School, offering discounts for single or double room with all-inclusive services (i.e. breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks and free of charge services for outdoors sports and recreational activities). More information about the prices and booking will follow soon. Interested participants can request the discount code to leidyenriquez@enoll.org.

About the VITALISE Project

Researchers need convenient access to Health and Wellbeing Living Lab infrastructures and procedures, as well as policies that foster innovative, person-centred research. The Health and Wellbeing research community has invested a great deal of effort in creating Living Labs to conduct research and innovation projects, with a lifecycle limited to the project’s duration, due to non-optimal use of time and resources and lack of a harmonization framework for their provided services, which restrain the exploitation potential of research results from local communities.

To address these challenges, VITALISE interlinks living labs coming from the three major living lab networks in Europe:

• ENoLL, with 130 living lab members around the world, 41% of which are in the health and wellbeing domain.
• Forum LLSA comprised of 38 members, all of which in the health and wellbeing domain.
• EIT Health Living Labs, composed of 56 active Living Labs and an additional 37 that are in the process of joining, all of them in the health and wellbeing domain.

By bringing together these three (3) networks, VITALISE interconnects the majority of Living Labs across Europe, to cover all European geographical areas and all the spectrum of the Health and Wellbeing domain. The aim is to open up living lab infrastructures as a means to facilitate and promote research activities in the health and wellbeing domain in Europe and beyond by enabling in-person Transnational Access to seventeen living lab research infrastructures and supporting remote digital access to datasets (Virtual Access) of rehabilitation, transitional care and everyday life activities through harmonized processes and common tools. The project will also develop training methods towards the wider understanding and valorisation of Living Lab methodologies in the research community.

Open Calls

VITALISE project grants free Transnational Access to external researchers from multiple disciplines to the project’s Livings Lab Research Infrastructures. The external researchers approved for Transational Access will have the opportunity to conduct research studies in the available infrastructures and be granted Virtual Access to datasets collected during the Joint Research Activities of the project for further analysis. The provision of Transnational Access will be implemented through three (3) Open Calls that will be conducted in the following months: (i) March 2022, (ii) December 2022 and (iii) May 2023. More information at https://vitalise-project.eu/transnational-access-to-research-infrastructures