Combining User and Context: Living Labs Innovation in Digital Services

Abstract

With the continuous advances of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) such as Ubiquitous Computing, Mobile Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), users' living contexts and daily life activities are increasingly digitalized. Based on these developments and other enabling factors, an emerging user- and context-driven open innovation approach called ''Living Lab" has recently gained rising popularity and momentum in both academia and industry. As an emerging and promising innovation approach, many theoretical and empirical insights are needed to understand the dynamics of Living Labs. This thesis focuses on Living Labs innovation in the digital services domain and it addresses three aspects of Living Labs: Concept, Architecture and Methods. The relative paucity of research on Living Labs advocates an exploratory approach that augments the research status quo with qualitative and quantitative empirical insights. The insights are gained from both a literature review and many years of Living Lab practice experiences from several Living Lab project cases in both academia and industry. The first aspect explores the Living Lab concept. A Living Lab concept framework is proposed by studying the key innovation principles of Living Lab and comparing the Living Lab principles with the corresponding Web 2.0 principles. The second aspect deals with the technical architecture of the Living Lab infrastructure. A ubiquitous Living Lab services platform is proposed and implemented by combining social media and the Web of Things. A common Living Lab technical architecture is generalized based on several Living Lab projects implementation experiences. A Web-based two-layered integration technical framework is proposed to integrate heterogeneous smart devices into business processes, and this framework is evaluated in a real-life elderly care case. The third aspect studies the methods used in Living Lab. A Living Lab process model and methods taxonomy are proposed and evaluated. Two case studies by different Living Lab methods are presented. Finally, a comparison of different Living Lab methods is summarized. The three studied Living Lab aspects are not separated from each other but intertwined in the whole Living Lab context for digital services innovation. Overall, this thesis advances a better understanding of the Living Labs innovation paradigm.