Within the context of open innovation and user innovation, Living Labs have emerged as an innovation management approach based on stakeholder co-creation and relying on contextual user involvement. Living Labs can be physical regions as well as virtual realities where stakeholders form so-called public-private-people partnerships (Schumacher & Niitamo, 2008; Følstad, 2008; Ståhlbröst, 2008; Almirall & Wareham, 2008; Schuurman et al., 2011). Living labs are built on four key principles: co-creation, exploration, experimentation and evaluation (Schaffers et al., 2007; Pallot M.,2009, Westerlund & Leminen, 2011).
Another Living Labs-characteristic is the natural context for end-users, allowing to capture contextual feedback on user experience. In practice, Living Labs have been put to use for social innovation purposes, giving a voice to end-users to allow to find bottom-up solutions to their own needs & wants, but also for more evaluative purposes, validating and finetuning ‘top-down’ innovations from companies or public institutions. Innovation is considered in a rather broad sense, as it can consist of incremental innovation, radical innovation, process innovation, service innovation, etc. This has led to a multitude of initiatives and projects being labeled as a Living Lab.”
As a rather young and recent phenomenon, there are still a lot of challenges and issues to be tackled by both scholars and practitioners. It is necessary to add to both the theoretical and practical knowledge on Living Labs in order to advance the state-of-the-art of this field. Within this call for papers, we welcome both conceptual and empirical papers.
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