Living Labs for Smart Innovation: a User-centric Approach

Abstract

The paper aims to describe the notion of Living Labs, then to frame it in a particular kind of innovation, namely smart cities. These metropolitan and urban contexts are redefined as it regards the way in which they have to be managed and due to the services provision. When stakeholders take part to this context, they carry different resources, favoring the emergence of innovation as a product of resource integration. Due to this, managers have to create the conditions to enable the mixing of resources towards smart projects. In line with this choice we depicted the city managers decisional process favoring user intervention through a two-step investigation: firstly we had an overall examination of Living Labs in Europe; secondly we analyzed two of the empirical evidences different one another because of the kind of area they are referred to through reports published by the actor acting as key player in the process towards smart city, and direct interviews performed with city managers to better investigate some issues. The investigation led us to the definition of a series of activities to leverage user’s involvement achieving resource integration to support smart cities projects through an innovation process mainly based on users contributions.

Keywords: Living Lab, User-centered Innovation, Smart City, Resource Integration

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe100268