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Abstract: In the past 15 years, Livings Labs (LLs) have been emerging as a process for implementing Social Open Innovation in Urban Innovation Ecosystems. This approach has shown significant contributions to for example urban transition, garnering substantial interest from academia, practitioners, and policymakers. Nevertheless, LLs face criticisms regarding sustainability, monitoring and scalability. In this context, a key aspect for both understanding and managing LLs is the perpetual evaluation of the value creation that is being created through these processes. Existing (LL) assessment frameworks often fall short in providing both generalizable and context-specific insights. Therefore, this study bridges this gap by drawing upon established literature and frameworks, such as the Theory of Change framework, participatory assessment approaches, and existing LL value assessment literature. Through two co-creative focus groups, these theoretical foundations were applied to develop the Living Lab Assessment Method (LLAM). The LLAM represents a methodology for context-sensitive value assessments of Living Labs.
Keywords: Living Labs; Value creation; Theory of Change; Participatory Research
1. Introduction
The Open Innovation (OI) concept, popularized by Henry Chesbrough (2010, 2014), provides a collaborative paradigm for technological innovation development. In his seminal work, Chesbrough advocates for enterprises to not only harness internal ideas and market routes but also tap into external sources for innovation development. While Open Innovation has its roots in a corporate context, over the past decades, organizations with societal agendas have also adopted OI strategies, leveraging for example local resources for services and knowledge transfers from, to, and between communities (Ahn et al., 2019), and demonstrating its utility in addressing pressing societal issues.
To operationalize the, often theoretical, 01 paradigm, living labs (LLs) have been emerging as a way to transform theory to practice, combining with principles from Open Innovation and User Innovation (Schuurman, 2015). This way, LLs provide a framework to guide decentralized innovation by fostering collaborative engagement between stakeholders, with end-users playing a central, co-creative role in real-world contexts (Schuurman, 2015). Over the years, various forms of LLs have been established, which share commonalities while also exhibiting distinctive characteristics. These include for example agroecosystem LLs (McPhee et al., 2021), campuses operating as LLs (Evans et al., 2015), and Living Labs serving as testbeds for emerging technologies (Følstad, 2008) in which new products and technologies are...