Is there such a thing as a living lab?

Following on from the previous entry on living labs, I would like to focus on the different uses and understandings of this concept. In particular, while reading up on this subject I was intrigued by the possibility that in academic usage the term living lab is applied to a rather diverse range of practices and phenomena that do not necessarily form a coherent and well-defined set.

In their article Living Labs: arbiters of mid- and ground-level innovation, Almirall and Warenham suggest that living labs can be seen as a response to the “inability of European nations to transform their research leadership into commercial successes in the marketplace” and offer a number of characteristics that living labs should or do manifest. According to the authors, living labs are collaborative projects that involve users in the innovation process. They may involve cooperation among a diverse range of actors. Furthermore, the authors even go so far as to say that living labs are “infrastructures that surface tacit, experiential and domain-based knowledge” or “explorative processes in real-life environments”.

While the above characterisations are certainly suggestive, the are also somewhat open-ended. Indeed, this is the line of arguments put forward by Schuurman, de Marez and Ballon in their review of the literature about living labs. 

The paper argues that living labs feature much more prominently in publications authored by European authors, generally focus on a small number of case studies and are methodologically diverse. Living labs are defined rather loosely and assumed to be examples of open innovation that focus on exploration.

Our main conclusion is that in terms of methodology and user characteristics, the Living Labs literature is rather silent and positions Living Labs too much as an ‘everything is possible’ concept that resembles an empty box, in the sense that you can put whatever methodology or research approach inside.

This is not meant to be a criticism of the concept, and the authors are quick to note that the practice of living labs is quite developed. Their conceptualisation, however, has some way to go.

Best,

Emils