Vitalise Booklet
for and by
This is a booklet for you, created as part of the Vitalise project. We strongly recommend to print it and learn from it, wherever you go. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101007990
What is Vitalise?
The challenge.
The research community in the Health and Wellbeing domain has invested a great deal of effort in establishing new Living Labs in order to support their research. They have also invested in learning about methodologies of user engagement and co-creation, such as design thinking, focus groups and ideation.
An important challenge in this line of research is to create trust between researchers and local communities as they evaluate and exploit research results. This has caused the creation of many project-oriented Living Labs that serve specific research purposes and have a lifecycle similar to a projects’ duration, thus leading to higher costs, non-optimal use of resources, time and distribution of work and expertise, limited exploitation of research results from local communities.
The solution.
Over the past years, as highlighted by the Helsinki Manifesto (November 2006, Finnish EU Presidency), Living Labs have come to be considered key and effective research infrastructures, especially within the Health and Wellbeing domain, where humans (young people, older adults, patients, etc.) and their needs are at the centre of the studies. Living Labs have also gained increased scholarly attention and productivity in terms of publications, over the last 5 years. The aforementioned challenges could be reduced if the researchers had effective and convenient access to Living Lab infrastructures, procedures and policies for real-life settings for experimentation, engaged involvement of participants, state of the art technology and teams with multidisciplinary expertise. VITALISE aims to put in place the winning conditions for researchers and communities, fostering innovative, person-centered research by creating a Health and Wellbeing Living Lab ecosystem.
To do so, VITALISE will base itself on the fundamental principles governing Living Labs and proceed towards harmonization of procedures of Health and Wellbeing Living Labs by creating a Harmonization Body. Although these communities are already strong and continue growing as singular entities, they still fail to provide and function according to unified and harmonized processes that are easily accessible and exploitable by academia and industry researchers, beyond the Living Lab internal researchers.
The project will enhance closer interaction between multidisciplinary researchers among and beyond the consortium partners through the Joint Research Activities, Transnational Physical and Virtual Access. Physical access refers to access in the infrastructure by physical presence (17 Living Lab research infrastructures across Europe) while Virtual refers to remote access using digital tools. VITALISE will also invest in the development of Training methods towards the wider understanding and valorisation of Living Lab methodologies in the research community.
Researchers need convenient access to Health and Wellbeing Living Lab infrastructures and procedures, as well as policies that foster innovative, person-centred research. The Health and Wellbeing research community has invested a great deal of effort in creating Living Labs to conduct research and innovation projects, with a lifecycle limited to the project’s duration, due to non-optimal use of time and resources and lack of a harmonization framework for their provided services, which restrain the exploitation potential of research results from local communities.
To address these challenges, VITALISE interlinks three major living lab networks in Europe:
- ENoLL, with 130 living lab members around the world, 41% of which are in the health and wellbeing domain;
- EIT Health Living Labs, composed of 56 active Living Labs and an additional 37 that are in the process of joining, all of them in the health and wellbeing domain;
- Forum LLSA comprised of 38 members, all of which in the health and wellbeing domain.
By bringing together these three (3) networks, VITALISE interconnects the majority of Living Labs across Europe, to cover all European geographical areas and all the spectrum of the Health and Wellbeing domain. The aim is to open up living lab infrastructures as a means to facilitate and promote research activities in the health and wellbeing domain in Europe and beyond by enabling in-person Transnational Access to seventeen (17) living lab research infrastructures and supporting remote digital access to datasets (Virtual Access) of rehabilitation, transitional care and everyday life activities through harmonized processes and common tools. The project will also develop training methods towards the wider understanding and valorisation of Living Lab methodologies in the research community.
What is a Living Lab?
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Living Labs (LLs) are open innovation ecosystems in real-life environments using iterative feedback processes throughout a lifecycle approach of an innovation to create sustainable impact. They focus on co-creation, rapid prototyping & testing and scaling-up innovations & businesses, providing (different types of) joint-value to the involved stakeholders. In this context, living labs operate as intermediaries/orchestrators among citizens, research organisations, companies and government agencies/levels. Within a wide variety of living labs, they all have common characteristics, but multiple different implementations.
Lliving labs are are innovation networks based on the philosophy of open innovation where users become equivalent to other participants. Hence the following distinction: within living labs, users shape the innovation in their daily real-life environments, whereas in traditional innovation networks or labs, users are observed and their insights are captured and interpreted by experts.
Living Labs = innovation networks based on the philosophy of open innovation where users become equivalent to other participants.
Westerlund and Leminen define living labs as: „physical regions or virtual realities, or interaction spaces, in which stakeholders form public-private-people partnerships (4Ps) of companies, public agencies, universities, users, and other stakeholders, all collaborating for creation, prototyping, validating, and testing of new technologies, services, products, and systems in real-life contexts”. As such, living labs are used by communities and for innovation.
The definition above highlights seven key characteristics of living labs:
- The innovation activities take place in real-life environments Public-private-people partnerships (4Ps) are formed by the participants, which include companies, researchers, authorities, and users;
- The importance of users, including citizens and customers, is emphasized;
- They are different from testbeds, field trials, and other forms of innovation;
- They feature innovations that are more mature than in-house R&D, where prototyping and field trials are more appropriate, but the innovations are less mature than would be found in pilot projects;
- Multiple stakeholders are employed in living labs;
- Multiple roles are pursued by stakeholders in living labs;
- Collaboration between stakeholders is an essential feature of living labs, which are grounded in the principles of open innovation.
Dont’t forget to update your notes!
Dont’t forget to update your notes!
Which of the 5 key elements do you already have experience with and what kind of? Click and select those familiar to you, and then write a few words about it as a note for yourself.
Do you have experience in active user involvement?
Do you have experience with real-life setting?
Do you have experience in multi-stakeholder participation?
Do you have experience in multi-method approach?
Do you have experience with co-creation?
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According to the above discussed Living Lab roles, actors, responsibilities, and services, position yourself and your colleagues in the diagram. By dragging the ADD A NAME button you can create a new namecard and drop it wherever you wish. Click on the . icon to edit the text in the box, then click the r icon to finish editing. If you want to delete a namecard, click on the r icon at the upper-right corner of the textbox.
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Ethical Framework
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What are the first 3 challenges that come to your mind regarding ethics?
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The first challenge:
The second challenge:
The third challenge:
Methodologies
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What is co-creation in your understanding? Create your own definition here!
Living Labs are open innovation networks or ecosystems that are focusing on the user co-creation approach, which indicates that the final users of products, services, or any type of innovations are active participants in their co-creation. Living Labs are using real-life, or existing settings, such as cities or different organizations, in order to bring together and test specific research and innovations, with a goal of creating new solutions for existing and/or new problems.
Living Labs provide great opportunities for testing before investing. In other words, their technological infrastructure is supporting testing, experimenting, piloting, and scaling up innovations in controlled as well as the uncontrolled dynamic environment. Developing skills through exploration, where mistakes are not avoided, but even encouraged, provides a great platform for success and for achieving a high impact.
The main goal of Living Labs is to foster collaboration between multiple stakeholders (e.g., public and private institutions, government, academia, and practice) and co-creation of solutions of the mutual problems, while bringing different disciplines together.
Feel free to write into the following text any of your thoughts, but most importantly try to summarize the goal of each phase with your own words. Don’t forget that you can also highlight those parts of the text that you find most important. At the end of the text please also try to complete the text with what you consider as your role specific only to your own praxis as researcher.
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Panel Management
Big number of innovations do not have the expected success because the product does not respond to the needs or to the user context. This is why more companies do want to involve end users in their development process more intensively as they can be the basis of new ideas. Involving end users is necessary but there are a few obstacles. The main obstacles are the following: access to end-users is not always easy (for a company); the increased information to be evaluated can be challenging; partial control loss can occur on market strategy and planning; increased complexity of project coordination can be demanding; there can be issues with confidentiality and intellectual property.
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Take a sec and think through how you would define what a user panel is.
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According to the above discussed user panel building, depict your own research field with concrete examples for external panel, platform panel, and community of interest. By dragging the ADD A PARTNER button you can create a new namecard and drop it wherever you wish. Click on the . icon to edit the text in the box, then click the r icon to finish editing. If you want to delete a namecard, click on the r icon at the upper-right corner of the textbox.
Dont’t forget to update your notes!