Q . What are living labs ?

A. The term "living lab" is at risk of becoming a buzzword in the innovation domain because it lacks a consistent or commonly accepted definition. Indeed, a wide variety of activities are carried out under the umbrella of living labs, and they feature many different methodologies and research perspectives. However, even if a common definition is beyond our reach, insights can be gained by understanding the common characteristics and types of living labs. Here we examine typical usages of the term "living lab" and how such labs may be categorized and studied; we also outline the practical benefits of this form of innovation.


Seppo Leminen
A. The term "living lab" is at risk of becoming a buzzword in the innovation domain because it lacks a consistent or commonly accepted definition.Indeed, a wide variety of activities are carried out under the umbrella of living labs, and they feature many different methodologies and research perspectives.However, even if a common definition is beyond our reach, insights can be gained by understanding the common characteristics and types of living labs.Here we examine typical usages of the term "living lab" and how such labs may be categorized and studied; we also outline the practical benefits of this form of innovation.

Characterizing Living Labs
The definition above highlights seven key characteristics of living labs: 1.The innovation activities take place in real-life environments (cf.Ballon et al., 2005;Intille et al., 2005Intille et al., , 2006)).

Q. What are living labs?
www.timreview.ca Q&A.What Are Living Labs?

Seppo Leminen
4. They are different from testbeds, field trials, and other forms of innovation (cf.Almirall et al., 2012;Ballon et al., 2005;Bergvall-Kåreborn et al., 2009;).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 (Ballon et al., 2005).
7. Collaboration between stakeholders is an essential feature of living labs, which are grounded in the principles of open innovation (cf.Leminen & Westerlund, 2012;Niitamo et al., 2006).

Categorizing Living Labs
The term "living lab" has been applied to many different types of innovation activities; however, even within the definition proposed above, there can be different types of living labs.In particular, the type of participant that is driving the innovation activities can be used to categorize living labs into utilizer-driven, enabler-driven, provider-driven, and user-driven (or user-community-driven) living labs (Leminen et al., 2012).The characteristics of each type are shown in Table 1.

Benefits of Living Labs
The living labs approach offers benefits to companies, users, developers, and public financiers.Companies benefit through cost-efficient access to end-user data and user experiences.They also save money by being able to make changes to a product much earlier in the devel- opment process based on user feedback.Over the longterm, living lab activities also tie customers to a company and its activities.
Users gain opportunities to influence the development of products.They also benefit from the solutions that are developed, which in many cases are solving problems that affect their everyday lives and which may have been otherwise unsolvable.Users also may perceive the new, user-driven products to be more functional because of the co-creative development process.
Living labs also contribute to the core activities of developers; the living labs brings opportunities and resources, and the developers bring their capabilities to develop real-world solutions to the users' problems.And, finally, public financiers benefit from activities and outcomes that support their objectives.
In addition to the benefits to participants, living labs also provide advantages over other types of innovation activities.Table 2 lists the advantages of a living labs approach.
Q&A.What Are Living Labs?

Living Labs vs Traditional Projects
Although there are many advantages of living labs, as listed in Table 2, they do bring certain management challenges in relation to traditional projects.To achieve the benefits of the living labs approach, participants should be aware of these differences and adjust their actions and roles accordingly (Table 3).

Roles in Living Labs
The literature provides a broad variety of rich descriptions on multiple and different stakeholders intertwined in innovation activities in real-life environments.Acknowledging the richness of such studies, the discussion offers many conceptualization of living labs.Such conceptualizations include roles and role patterns (Leminen et al., 2014a(Leminen et al., , 2014b;;Nyström et al., 2014), but also how creative consumer roles explain the emergence of innovation outcomes (Leminen et al., 2015a) and how network structures and driv-ing parties increase the likelihood of targeted innovation outcomes (Leminen et al., forthcoming) in living labs.

Conclusion
A living lab is one form of emerging open innovation network that provide many benefits for companies and other organizations, and it offer many research opportunities to scholars.As our understanding of the phenomenon expands and our usage of the terminology converges, we will further maximize the benefits of the living labs approach to innovation.

About the Author Seppo Leminen holds
positions as Principal Lecturer at the Laurea University of Applied Sciences and Adjunct Professor in the School of Business at Aalto University in Finland.He holds a doctoral degree in Marketing from the Hanken School of Economics and a licentiate degree in Information Technology from the Helsinki University of Technology (now the School of Electrical Engineering at Aalto University).His doctoral research focused on perceived differences and gaps in buyer-seller relationships in the telecommunication industry.His research and consulting interests include living labs, open innovation, value co-creation and capture with users, neuromarketing, relationships, services, and business models in marketing as well as management models in hightech and service-intensive industries.Results from his research have been reported in Industrial Marketing Management, the Journal of Technology and Engineering and Management, Management Decision, the International Journal of Technology Management, and the Technology Innovation Management Review, among many others.