Living labs (LLs) are becoming an increasingly popular approach to engage in open innovation. Although applications and in?uence of LLs have grown rapidly over the last decade, the landscape of LL research remains largely unclear and underexplored. Hence, there is an urgent need to develop a consolidated understanding of this research field and to detect the potential areas of fragmentation and isolation. Through a systematic review of the scholarly literature on LLs, this study applies bibliometric methods on a dataset of 411 journal articles. The results of this study reveal the diverse and fragmented nature of the LL field, with contributions spanning across different disciplines and application domains. Despite such fragmentation, some clusters of scholars and publications are identified as well as influential contributions. Given the nascent state of the literature, the role of special issues in shaping the evolution of the LL debate is prominent. This study provides a map to practitioners to investigate and learn from the application of LLs in diverse fields. This aspect is particularly important in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, which stresses the key role of open and collaborative approaches to innovation, making the use of LLs increasingly relevant for governments, companies, public organisations and individuals.
Living Labs have received increasing attention over the last decade. However, despite their growing popularity and ability to positively impact organisations’ innovation performance, mainstream innovation management literature has overlooked the diverse and promising Living Labs research landscape. In an effort to move the field forward, this study analyses extant Living Labs literature in the domain of innovation management. The study identifies conceptual bases informing Living Labs research, maps the collaboration between scholars in the field, examines prevailing themes influencing the debate and reveals the influence of Living Labs research on other domains. Bibliometric methods of co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence analysis as well as bibliographic coupling are employed on two databases. Database A includes 97 focal journal articles and Database B includes all cited sources of Database A, totalling 500 documents. This study reveals the rapid growth of the scholarly literature on Living Labs in the innovation management domain, driven by a core group of authors. However, other contributions from highly visible scholars have the potential to connect Living Lab research to mainstream innovation management studies. The study also identifies the influence of Living Labs research in different application fields and potential for its further evolution.
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