The aim of the Apulian ICT Liviing Lab – ACTLab, promoted by the Industrial Research and Innovation Department of Regione Puglia Administration, is the spread of the knowledge based networking model developed in our region, where local social stakeholders could also cooperate at European level by sharing ICT tools oriented to a better quality of life. In setting up this kind of knowledge network, a Public Administration have anyway to define the pipeline of the network development and in the case of Apulia Region, the strategy is based on the following application domains:

Environment Security and Territorial Protection; Transport and Sustainable Mobility; Creative and Digital Economy; Training and Education; Health, Wellness and Socio-cultural Dynamics; Electronic Governance by the PA; Competitive and Renewable Energy; Cultural Heritage and Tourism.
Participating in ENoLL, ACTLab will increase useful opportunities for sharing and exploiting the ACTLab results in an open innovation context, aiming to pursue the goal of internationalizing Puglia Region as an ideal meeting, study and research hub for Smart Communities development, an engine of economic development for a new “Caring economy”.

References and Track Record

Apulian ICT Living Lab http://livinglabs.regione.puglia.it (see also the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3a28lEkwuQ) is an action of the ERDF 2007-2013 of Regione Puglia, which allows Apulian ICT SMEs to experiment innovative ICT solutions and prototypes of new products and services, through shared knowledge and exchange of researchers, enterprises and organized groups of citizens: they are regarded as a way of meeting innovation challenges faced by ICT service providers.

As host institution INNOVAPUGLIA links in the project ACTLab a number of local Living Labs (79) funded through the Apulian ICT Living Labs Smart Puglia 2020 Living Labs programme of Regione Puglia Administration and managed by InnovaPuglia SpA. These local LL operate in 8 thematic fields performing each one different activities related to the IT application, carrying out the project based on user needs satisfaction following the LL approach.

Taking in account that the structure of our Living Lab could be defined as a “ Users Services Oriented Community”, Users role in ACTLab is strategic in terms of:

• Co-design of services/products to be realized as solution for user needs
• Test and validation of services/products to be realized as solution for user needs
• Market design for business model developments

Methods and tools adopted for users active involvement are:

• Operative focus group for sharing problems and difficulties, designing solution perspectives, suggesting strategies for results exploitation, further stakeholders involvement, networking actions.
• Workshop for dissemination
• Communication plans

In terms of concrete practice of the Living Lab, it plays a fundamental role the DemoLab located at the user headquarter, where the deployed technological solutions could be applied everyday by a number of end users: professionals, students, workers of cultural industries and everybody could be interested in. The DemoLab became the core of the Living Lab, the locus of crossing between knowledge, real life and concrete experience. In fact, collecting and strictly referring to the activities of the local Living Labs funded through the Apulian ICT Living Labs programme, ACTLab represents a true unique experience of stakeholders multithematic aggregation in which technologies are the tools of connection between single projects and the LL praxis is the reproducible mechanism that allows the growth of the network.