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Urban areas are often characterized by complex problems, such as social and economic deprivation, segregation, or bureaucratic administration. Urban living laboratories provide a promising approach to redefining and tackling such problems in novel ways by enabling bottom-up innovation with various actors. The present study examined an urban living lab initiative in a suburban area of Espoo, Finland, where guided workshops based on the Change Laboratory method were arranged. The findings show that, before development projects are launched, it is important to dedicate sufficient time to the early innovation process, which includes building relationships, sharing knowledge, exploring ignorance, and innovating new concepts. The study emphasizes the importance of distinguishing early innovation processes from later ones, which means separating the "preject" from the "project". We conclude that successful management of an urban living lab combines bottom-up and topdown approaches.
Keywords: Change Laboratory; innovation management, innovation process; preject; urban living labs
Introduction
Living laboratories have increasingly been used as platforms for innovation and experimentation in urban areas, involving key features of open innovation, a multistakeholder approach, real-life environments, and residents as users (Friedlich et al., 2013; Veeckman & Graaf, 2015). The goals of urban living labs can vary according to their environments, from small-scale experiments of new technology and services to large-scale social and economic improvement (Franz et al., 2015). In addition to complex problems in physical environments, there are social and economic problems that are difficult to understand and handle due to their multidimensional nature, such as stigmatization, unemployment, and segregation of ethnic minorities. There are also problems due to organized complexity: a multiplicity of organizations steering the region can result in competitive and overlapping systems of administration (Baynes, 2013; Wallin, 2013). Due to multi-layered problems, urban living labs call for practice-based innovation with diffuse and heterogeneous knowledge production, instead of homogenous accumulation of knowledge and clearlydefined problem solving (Melkas & Harmaakorpi, 2008). Thus, an urban living lab usually starts as a bottom-up process setting additional challenges for problem definition and the composition of actors.
The purpose of this article is to describe an urban living lab initiative in a suburban area by examining the early phase of its innovation process, which is also called the front-end phase in research literature. The front-end phase refers to...