The Living Lab concept proposes a number of guidelines (user-centric design, iterative in-the-wild testing, user involvement & panel management, etc…), yet does not offer much in term of practical guidance on how to run an innovation project in real-life. Agile project management methodologies do offer such guidance yet have been critiqued for not providing a focus on the end-user. The Framework for Agile Living Labs (FALL) projects aim to provide practitioners with actionable guidelines on how to run a Living Lab project in an agile way. Agility means being able to flexibly integrate new information in the project’s roadmap, which is exactly the type of situation that a Living Lab project will find itself in, due to its focus on iterative testing with end-users.

FALL – Framework for Agile Living Labs

A first version of FALL has been described in http://www.timreview.ca/article/1048. Since then, imec’s Application prototyping and Living Lab (APLL) department have refined its application in numerous projects. This has been revised into FALL v2, based on our most recent experiences. The method is particularly focused on practitioners and its aim is to provide actionable insights on how to perform Living Lab projects in an agile way. Various agile project management methods exist. FALL is based on SCRUM, which takes an approach that is composed of steps that are limited in time (i.e. timeboxed) and focusses on incremental delivery. SCRUM structures communications in a project, making sure that expectations are managed correctly and that the team discusses critical issues. You can read more on SCRUM on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Scrum_(software_development).

FALL IN 9 STEPS

(developed by imec.living labs)