A Living Lab as a Service: Creating Value for Micro-enterprises through Collaboration and Innovation

The need to innovate is increasingly important for all types and sizes of organizations, but the opportunities for innovation differ substantially between them. For micro-, small,- and medium-sized enterprises, innovation activities are both crucial and demanding because of limited resources, competencies, or vision to innovate their offerings. To support these organizations, the concept of living labs as a service has started to emerge. This concept refers to living labs offering services such as designing the idea-generation processes, planning or carrying out real-world tests of innovations, and pre-market launch assessments. In this article, we will present the findings from a study of micro-enterprises operating in the information technology development sector, including the experienced value of services provided to the companies by a research-based living lab. We share experiences from Botnia, our own living lab in northern Sweden. In this living lab, our aim of creating value for customers is of key importance. Our study shows that using a living lab as a service can generate three different types of value: improved innovations, the role the living lab can play, and the support the living lab offers

Information Systems Development Process: a Living Lab Perspective

This article explores information systems development (ISD) process, when ISD follows a living lab approach. Living lab is an innovation development approach in which stakeholders are involved in co-create, implement, test and adopt innovations in a real-life setting. Several aspects in living lab setting such as voluntary nature of user engagement, a real-life context of innovation development and consequently difficulty to observe, and immaturity of innovation in living lab activities will influence ISD process in the living lab setting. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to understand how ISD process is shaped, when ISD follows a living lab approach. The aim will be achieved by conducting four participatory knowledge generation workshops as the primary sources of empirical data, in the context of three European projects (namely, AdaptUrbanRail, UNaLab, and LiLaCC) as well as an international conference (DLLD20). A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of ISD process following living lab approach will also be presented

Stakeholders in Smart City Living Lab Processes

Due to the increasing urbanization around the world, cities are growing at fast pace and following that, many cities face problems that includes both hard and soft issues. This can for instance be transportation, energy suppliance, social inclusion and quality of life for its citizens. As a way to contribute to solving these problems the smart city concept has emerged. This concept is focusing on capitalizing on ICT landscape in a strategic way. To achieve a smart city it is important to start with understanding the people and their needs which can be supported by a Living Lab. These Living Lab involve a multitude of stakeholders in their innovation processes and thus, it becomes important to understand the power dependencies, claims and roles these stakeholders have. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explores the stakeholders that are involved in smart city innovation processes supported by Living La

Disregarding History: Contemporary IS Contexts and Participatory Design

User participation has long been seen as a core topic of study within the IS field, yet its relevance to contemporary development environments and contexts has recently been brought into question. The aim of this article is to investigate the extent to which this rich history and experience is used to inform contemporary practices. We provide a survey that evaluates the degree to which PD (participatory design) is currently represented in the IS literature, the results of which reveal a low representation. Based on these findings, a number of propositions are offered

Facebook Users Attitudes towards Secondary Use of Personal Information

This paper reports on a study of how user attitudes to institutional privacy change after exposing users to potential inferences that can be made from information disclosed on Facebook. Two sets of focus group sessions with Facebook users were conducted. Three sessions were conducted by demonstrating to the users, on a general level, what can be inferred from posts using prototypical software called DataBait. Another set of three sessions let the users experience the potential inferences from their own actual Facebook profiles by using the DataBait tool. Findings suggest that the participants’ attitudes to secondary use of information changed from affective to cognitive when they were exposed to potential third-party inferences using their own actual personal information. This observation calls for more research into online tools that allow users to manage and educate themselves dynamically about their own disclosure practices

A Model for Reflective Participatory Design - The Role of Participation, Voice and Space

This paper aims to contribute to the participatory tradition in health informatics by presenting a model for reflective participatory design emerging from qualitative fieldwork in a participatory project aimed to improve the health and wellbeing of older people in the northern periphery regions of Europe, through new mobile services. The model brings together two established processes in novel ways: systems development and user participation. Within each process three concepts are presented to facilitate discussion and reflection at the concept level, the process level and the integrated process level

A set of key-principles to asses the impact of living labs

Among companies there is an ongoing shift from a product-based economy to a service economy, especially among companies who delivers digital services. The service sector is growing rapidly, which puts pressure on companies to keep up with their competitors. This is an often demanding process, especially for SMEs who do not have the resources to continuously develop their business. To support these SMEs innovation processes, a concept called the Living Lab is starting to grow around Europe. These Living Labs strive to support companies innovation processes by offering a neutral arena where different stakeholders can meet and co-develop innovations. However, the effects of Living Labs operations are to some extent unexplored and under-theorized. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is two-fold: to propose a set of principles for conducting Living Lab research in an innovation context and to assess the impact of the Living Lab approach on the innovation process and its stakeholders by means of the proposed principles. This study shows that the Living Lab approach offers values in many different ways for several stakeholders.Validerad; 2013; 20121207 (ysko

Human-centric evaluation of innovation

In this Licentiate Thesis, human-centric evaluation of innovations are investigated with focus on examining and gaining understanding of important issues that needs to be considered in the evaluation process. The intention of my research is to contribute to IT-design processes so that future products and services, that are in various stages of development, become more responsive to users' actual needs and wants. IT has traditionally been used within the boundaries for either work- practices or private use. Nowadays, however, these boundaries have become increasingly blurred. Today's technology should not only support work, but also leisure. This means that the use of IT additionally includes areas such as entertainment, education, news, and marketing. Furthermore, IT- products and services should also be supportive for people in their different, although concurrent, everyday roles, such as parent, colleague, friend, consumer, and partner. These changed use contexts and use patterns have made it even more significant to understand the importance of designing technology to support different use situations. To get knowledge about how technology can support use patterns and use contexts a means is user involvement and through continuous evaluations. The evaluations reported in this thesis are evaluations of innovations. Evaluation of use of technology has often focused on usability aspects. Now, the area has developed to include additional use aspects, such as interaction and use experiences. Hence, the area of user evaluation has altered to include a broader question, how technology fits within a broad range of human needs. In this thesis, the reported evaluations mainly have been carried out in a Living Lab context. Living Labs aim to support innovation processes among businesses and local and central authorities by offering human-centric evaluation of innovations in a real-world use environment. The Living Lab concept is rather new. Thus, the evaluation processes, performed within this context, need to be examined. The investigation in this thesis has been carried out following an action research approach within a Living Lab. In this course, four human-centric evaluations were performed: a piece of furniture displaying video-art, a mobile marketing service, a civic-service office, and a mobile-phone bus timetable. The investigation has illuminated that the context in which the evaluations occur is critical. Hence, it needs to be considered and intentionally studied. My study has also shown that the development context for innovations is complex; there are many stakeholders involved with different knowledge interests and therefore, to reach a common purpose of the evaluation is complicated. In addition, it is difficult for stakeholders to express their evaluation needs clearly. Hence, a focus on needs facilitates planning and designing the evaluation process. In this research, an aspect that have been identified as important to consider in evaluations of innovations is that users are reluctant to change their behaviour; hence, it is not possible to evaluate the actual impact of an innovation on people's lives. Instead, the focus of the evaluation should be on valuing users' attitudes and thoughts related to the innovation. In addition, evaluations of innovations are often formative in character, aiming to form the innovations in some way. In these evaluations, it is important to include users who are innovative and open to new technologies. It is also important to include active non-users in evaluations, since their attitudes could reveal necessary changes that would make them want to use the innovation. Finally, when evaluating how an evaluand fits into a range of user needs, it has been found that user needs can be met at different levels. This means that a product, or a service, can meet the need of a user concerning one aspect, but still, the user might not be aware of the need of the product or service, as such. So, a need of an innovation might exist, but the users do not use it anyway; the users fulfil their needs by a different means. Therefore, if an innovation does what the users need it to do, a change in user behaviour needs to be encouraged to help the users change their actions.Godkänd; 2006; 20070110 (haneit

PredicTool : evaluation of a mobile marketing service from a user perspective

The focus of this test was a mobile marketing service that presented personalized offers to the customer. The service had three different channels for communication with the customer, a webpage, a kiosk in the store and SMS through their mobile phones. The campaigns in the kiosk and at the webpage were pull-campaigns meaning that the customers could look and download pre-definied coupons to their mobile phones. During the test period 10-15 offers has been available every week in the kiosk and at the webpage. The campaigns over SMS were push-campaigns where the customer got offers related to their personal profile without having to do anything. The offers over SMS have been sent, at the most, once a week to each customer. 298 persons chose to be members in the mobile loyalty club during the test- period. After the test period, the test-pilots opinions have been collected through web-surveys and focus-group interviews. The evaluation showed that the overall opinion about the service and the communication channels it contains were that it was easy to use. The users were also positive to the opportunity to get offers via their mobile-phone, the kiosk and the Internet. The results also revealed important things to consider when using mobile marketing as well as ideas for future development of the service.Godkänd; 2005; 20060928 (evan

Forming future IT : the living lab way of user involvement

This thesis addresses the process of user involvement in the development of information technology (IT) systems. The motive for this research is that there is still a need of more knowledge about how users can be involved in IT-development when the aim is to develop solutions that represent user needs. This is especially true when the IT-system is developed to attract users as private persons. One attempt to facilitate inclusion of private persons in IT development processes is a phenomenon called Living Lab. Living Labs is a human-centric research and development approach in which IT-systems are co-created, tested, and evaluated in the users' own private context. The Living Lab phenomena can be viewed in two ways, as an environment, and, as an approach and in this thesis, the perspective taken is Living Lab as an approach. Since the Living Lab phenomena is a rather new area there is a noticeable lack of theories and methods supporting its actions. Hence, the purpose of my research is to contribute to a successful use of Living Labs as a means for user involvement by answering the question: How can a Living Lab approach for user involvement that focus on user needs, be designed? To gain insights into the topic I have been involved in three development projects in which the aim was to develop IT solutions based on users' needs. The research method applied in this research is action research based on an interpretive stance; I have used different methods for data- collection, such as focus-group interviews, surveys, and work-shops. In short, the main lessons learned from this research relates to three overarching themes; User involvement, Grappling with user needs, and Living Labs. The first theme concern issues such as user characteristics, user roles, when and how users should be involved. The second theme is divided into two clusters, collecting user data, and generating and understanding user needs. Lessons related to collecting users data concern topics such as encouraging users, storytelling, understanding the social context and the users' situation. The lessons regarding generating and understanding user needs relates to users motivation, the importance of understanding different perspectives and different levels of user needs. The third theme relates to the key-principles of Living Lab approaches, and how these principles are handled, supported, and related to each other in user involvement processes that embrace a Living Lab approach. Based on the lessons learned about the three themes, a methodology called FormIT is formed. The aim of FormIT is to assist Living Lab activities in Living Lab environments, and the methodology is built on ten guidelines. These guidelines are Identify, Inform, Interact, Iterate, Involve, Influence, Inspire, Illuminate, Integrate, and Implement, and they support the design of a Living Lab way of user involvement processes and contribute to fulfil the key-principles of Living Labs. To conclude, this thesis contributes to the understanding of how data about user needs can be collected, generated, and understood through a Living Lab way of user involvement processes. This in turn, contributes to the development of future IT-systems based on user needs, which increases the probability for system acceptance among private persons.Godkänd; 2008; 20081124 (ysko