International audiencePurpose-French universities can play a key role in generating Smart City approach through an innovative Public-Private Partnership dedicated to urban transformation.Methodology-We led an action-research study for five years with several research and pedagogic projects including users or citizens.Findings-The paper points out main factors of Smart City development. It also presents shared demonstrators’ characteristics including industrial scale, sustainability and citizens’ participation.Practical implications-University of Lorraine diversification strategy through the “Chaire REVES” supported by public and private partners.Social implications-At regional level, industrial-university-territorial partnerships could tackle both societal and economical issues “with”, “for”, and “by” citizens.Originality/value-Based on the Living Lab concept our case study shows a concrete regional university strategy involving: user-centric design, collaborative processes, citizens’ workshops and new financial and organizational answers enabling collaboration between private companies and public institutions. Our paper also argues that innovative public and private partnership involving users are necessary for developing smart cities

International audienceLiving Lab Mode for urban projects opens various fields of investigation for urban project management and Living Lab methodology. Using a three year-experiment on co-designing an eco-neighborhood, this study case contributes to examine the specificity of long-term user-oriented project management. Furthermore, the study describes the development of a method to implement a project in Living Lab Mode. Finally, the research underlines the mutual contribution between participatory process and co-design process in an urban project

This paper presents an empirical study focusing on the role of mock-ups to support user/citizens co-creation and the anticipation of the User eXperience within a specific urban Living Lab. Scholars have previously identified different principles characterizing a Living Lab, such as: "realism", spontaneity, continuity and empowerment, which represent the "live" dimension of Living Labs. However, these principles are quite difficult to practically implement. Nonetheless, we conducted an experiment in the context of an urban project dedicated to the design of mobility stations that reveals the paramount importance of the mock-up role for implementing the "realism" principle. The findings unveil the great potential of close-to-real-life immersion of users/citizens in realistic environments to not only fulfilling the "realism" principle but also greatly contributing to the adoption by users/citizens. Finally, this study gives some elements to support citizens' engagement in the co-creation stage of the urban design process towards the realization of smart-cities.

This paper presents a case study on emerging challenges within collaborative innovation projects engaging open communities. Innovation driven by open communities has proven to have a significant potential, in particular for open source software. However, tools and methodologies enabling the supervision of collaborative innovation involving open communities, in the perspective of creating open hardware to solve societal issues, remains at the early stages. This paper seeks to pinpoint the potentialities and challenges of such projects toward defining methods to better support a multi-stakeholders open source collaboration context. The experimental field of this research concerns the smart electricity distribution, and more precisely a public driven project of the diffusion of smart-meters in France and their appropriation by open source communities, with the involvement of the university and a public industrial company. The project seeks to study how these communities of users develop in a collaborative manner, new products and services using the smart-meter as a support technology. The first results show that the open community makes natural connection on specific environments such as Smart buildings to materialize usages of smart meters.

The complexity of urban systems is an increasingly common topic in academic literature. Following in the footsteps of the industrial sector, which has understood this issue for many years now, urban engineering must also tackle the challenges created by complex systems. Industrial engineering has provided a number of responses to this challenge, including design technologies, which are notably collaborative. It seems possible, at least in theory, to transfer a number of best practice methods and adapt these to the conceptualisation of urban development projects (in the initial phase) in order to encourage their global management (in terms of strategic decision-making) and their social acceptability. The challenge is then to formulate new methodological models, as well as to create an environment dedicated to their application.