RESOURCES

The Living Labs Approach

PARTERRE adopts the Territorial Living Labs approach (Marsh 2008) for the empowerment of local communities and for the sustainable deployment of the proposed ICT solutions in the public administration domain. Briefly, the Living Labs approach was born in the R&D community but is now being equally applied for the implementation of innovation initiatives in general, whereby innovation is driven by the users. In practice, research is conducted in an applied fashion, with real end-users providing feedback, as a means of effecting a desired outcome. In particular, PARTERRE adopts a methodology and platform derived from previous EU-funded R&D and deployment projects (such as LexiPation, TELL-ME, MedLab and more recently CentraLab) to establish and manage Living Lab trials in the respective application domains. The PARTERRE pilots are further described in the corresponding section of this site.
A common denominator of all pilot implementations is the concept of user-driven, open innovation. In operational terms, this means to collect, structure, and prioritize the ideas, contributions and proposals emerging from active interaction between designers and the citizenry, whom we intend to capture in their respective, real-life roles as citizens, businessmen, customers, and public sector authorities.
The project is also linked with existing best practice at European level, referring to both the Living Labs approach as such (i.e., the ENoLL, European Network of Living Labs, which all user partners are already members of), and the various application domains proposed in the trials. Scientific, institutional and media dissemination will be performed at the Country level, to ensure the widest uptake and to give impulse to further cooperation of the consortium with other on-going projects, programmes and initiatives.
Several local meetings and a final workshop will be organised during the work programme. After taking stock of the trial results, the Consortium will lay the foundation for the establishment of a permanent Living Labs infrastructure, aimed at innovation service providing to public and private organisations, in each country or region where it does not exist as yet.