Please tell us more about the work of KTP and KTP living lab?

KTP is a well-developed Business Innovation Centre offering a full portfolio of services: incubation, acceleration and mentoring, seed funding, offices and labs, mostly for start-ups and SME’s working in IT, IoT and creative industry. The more specific aspect of our offer are tax incentives, as we manage the Krakow Special Economic Zone too. We are quite good in finding some niches and offering tailor-made services for companies active in these niches. Game development sector would be the best case, but a few years ago we started to support smart city companies as well, and this brought us to living lab methodology. Forum Virium Helsinki became one of our strategic partners and Jarmo Eskelinen was advising us and the City of Krakow on nearly daily-basis, so we had a chance to learn from the very best experts.

What is the living lab landscape in Poland and KTP’s role within it?

If we talk about living labs specifically, it is still quite poor. KTP became the second accredited LL in Poland, and although the living lab concept appears more and more often in public policy for innovation support, the understanding of this concept is highly diverse and in many cases quite naive. Anyway, there are many more people keen on various user-centred-innovation methods, including customer development, design thinking, lean start-up and others, so we have a reference we can build on. We have also started to mainstream the LL approach and there are more and more people in the public administration open for this kind of thinking. I believe we still need much more business cases to build a good narration on living labs. OpenLivingLab Days gives us a unique chance to show some cases from more experienced living lab ecosystems.

What can participants expect from OpenLivingLab Days in Krakow? Particularly those who have attended previous editions of OpenLivingLab Days

Although KTP is experienced in event making, our main aim is quite moderate: not to screw anything up. We want to deliver a good OLL standard in the best sense of this word. Anyway, we have planned some fresh modifications based on the reach OLL history. The most important issue would be to find a much tighter relation between program (especially workshops) and the local context, as we believe OpenLivingLab Days should be based itself on living lab approach. That means: real problems and issues as cases for living lab methodology. You will have a chance to learn a lot about Krakow, not only as a touristic and cultural attractive city, but as a place to live with its specific strengths and shadows.

What do you hope to achieve from hosting OpenLivingLab Days?

In one sentence, we want to achieve great UX level. It is the most important issue, as events are basically about experience. But obviously we have some more internal aims as well. On one hand, we want to develop out staff competence in living lab methodology, as OLL gives us a unique chance and a few hundred of highly skilled and talented LL experts will be available for the whole KTP team for a short, but intensive time. So we want to take the chance to learn as much as possible.

The second aim is more city and region oriented: we want people from business, science and administration to learn much more about the living lab approach, as user-centred-innovation methods are widely spread between start-ups, but not necessarily among other groups. Also some specific know-how that our guests will bring to Krakow, especially in various fields of smart city, is of high value and we want people working for the City to establish some new relations or even to consult their ideas or projects.

Interview was conducted by Spela Zalokar on 28 April 2017.