Living Lab Method - sedioben/IoTproject GitHub Wiki
The Living Lab is a systematic user-centered research method for developing and exploring new ideas. Through the co-creation approach, not only the innovation and research processes are combined but also that users and stakeholder e.g. partners and designers participate and work together in this phase. By doing this, the goal is to gain access to users' ideas, experiences and knowledge based on their daily needs and desires related to IoT applications, products, and services. The users also participate by generating ideas, innovative concepts and bringing in the associated hardware or software. Therefore, it enables research groups to improve and create value in products, services or IoT applications. [1]
Living Lab can be characterized in multiple ways and serve several purposes. They are both practice-driven organizations that facilitate and foster open, collaborative innovation, as well as real-life environments or arenas, where both open innovation and user innovation processes can be studied and experimented with, and where new solutions are developed. [1]
The Living Lab Method consists of the following phases:
1. Co-Creation
The first phase consists of three sub-phases of analysis (problems, needs, and market analysis), ideation and co-design with users and other stakeholders. Tools to be used in this stage are brainstorming sessions, focus groups or interviews and questionnaires. Other instruments can be used to get a more detailed view e.g. Personas, Canvas Methods, etc.). After filtering and ranking the ideas, an innovative and highly promising idea will be selected. [2]
2. Exploration
In the exploration phase, the main goal is to get an overview of the current habits and practices of the target users. Then the mission is to move from an idea towards a concept or prototype of the solution. After identifying the problem, the solution will be fitted with the problem as good as possible. In other words, this task would be labeled as the 'problem-solution fit'. [2]
The primary tool used in the exploration phase is prototyping. The prototypes can be used to simulate the products and services of an idea in order to explain them to team members or stakeholders better. [2]
3. Experimentation
After building the prototype, the experimentation phase puts it to extensive testing. The goal is to test the solution in situations that are as 'real life' as possible. The testing can be done over a short or long term with a few or a large number of users. At the end of this phase following decision has to be made [3]:
Either heading back to the exploration stage and iterate the solution or is the solution ready to continue with the evaluation stage?
4. Evaluation
The evaluation phase is the most critical step in the whole living lab process because it has to identify the solutions' ability to permeate across users and their environments. The evaluation of a process can be considered from different viewpoints. For example, one of those viewpoints is on understanding the potential market for this solution and whether it has the capacity to generate revenue. All in all, the conclusions made in this phase can help to uncover improvements and opportunities in order to optimize the solution. [2]
Source:
[1] Schumacher, J.; Feurstein, K.: Living labs – a new multi-stakeholder approach to user integration, Presented at the 3rd International Conference on Interoperability of Enterprise Systems and Applications (I-ESA'07), Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, 2007. [2] https://www.ausmt.org/index.php/AUSMT/article/view/134/117 [3] https://u4iot.eu/pdf/U4IoT_LivingLabMethodology_Handbook.pdf