Abstract:In this paper we focus on a new research area, Living Lab that introduces new ways of managing innovation processes. A Living Lab can be viewed as both an innovation milieu and an innovation approach, and the aim of this paper is to clarify these two perspectives, as well as to illustrate how they can enrich each other. This is done by presenting one Living Lab milieu, Botnia Living Lab, and its key components; and one Living Lab approach, FormIT, and its key principles. The presentation is done on two levels, one general level and one case specific level. The case focuses on involving citizens in the design of an e-service aimed to increase their influence in a municipality and its development. Through this we learnt that the key components of a Living Lab constitutes important structures that enhance the process and as such the principles.Keywords: Living Labs, citizen-centric, FormIT, design, innovation, openness, realism, empowerment of users Biographical notes: Birgitta Bergvall-Kåreborn is an Associates professor in Social Informatics at Luleå University of Technology, where she also earned her Ph.D. Her current research interests concern participatory design in distributed and open environments; human centric and appreciative methodologies and methods for design, evaluation and learning; and, the relation between IT-use and IT-design. She has contributed to the field of participatory design with more than thirty conference-and journal publications, and served as a referee in a number of academic conferences and journals.Anna Ståhlbröst is a researcher and project manager at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. Her research interests are process-based methods, which include various stakeholders, to appreciate opportunities for innovative technology development in Living Lab environments. These methods specifically focus on generating user needs from different real-world use situations and assessing users' experience of specific IT artefacts. Anna's research objective is to contribute to the design process to assure that innovative technologies will represent user needs and thereby give the users an added value. Anna has participated in several international and national innovation projects and her research is related to Botnia Living Lab and to establishing networks of Living Labs, both on European and Nordic levels.B. Bergvall-Kåreborn, A. Ståhlbröst

Abstract:Among companies there is an ongoing shift from a product--based economy to a service economy, especially among companies who delivers digital services. The service sector is growing rapidly, which puts pressure on companies to keep up with their competitors. This is an often demanding process, especially for SMEs who do not have the resources to continuously develop their business. To support these SMEs' innovation processes, a concept called the Living Lab is starting to grow around Europe. These Living Labs strive to support companies' innovation processes by offering a neutral arena where different stakeholders can meet and co--develop innovations. However, the effects of Living Labs operations are to some extent unexplored and under--theorized. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is two--fold: to propose a set of principles for conducting Living Lab research in an innovation context and to assess the impact of the Living Lab approach on the innovation process and its stakeholders by means of the proposed principles. This study shows that the Living Lab approach offers values in many different ways for several stakeholders.

A rapid growth of technologies supporting user interaction on the Internet, such as social networking sites and other virtual communities, can be seen today. These virtual communities have been shown to be of great value to companies that want to involve users in their innovation processes. However, in order to guide organisations on how to utilise their innovation intermediary communities, more knowledge is needed regarding who they are and their motivational drivers for participating in a community. The aim of this paper therefore is to explore who the users are and what motivates them to contribute to innovation processes in an innovation intermediary community. The main findings of our study indicate that users' motivation to participate is influenced by community type as well as technology adoption type. This study show that in innovation intermediary communities, one important motivational factor for users is learning.