Living Labs

Background of living labs

The Living Lab concept was developed by Professor William J. Mitchell, of the MIT Media Lab and School of Architecture. In constantly evolving social and work environments, Professor Mitchell proposed user-centric research methods in real life environments to identify and build prototypes, and to evaluate multiple solutions.

Living Lab is a system for building the future innovation environment in which real-life user-driven research and innovation will be a normal co-creation technique for new products, services and social infrastructure. This human-based involvement enables the development of useful new services and products. A Living Lab takes advantage of pools of creative talent, socio-cultural diversity, and the unpredictability of inventiveness and imagination of end-users.

Living Labs unite different stakeholders in cooperation, bringing together Enablers, Utilizers, Developers and Users. These co-creators include the public sector, business and science parks, incubators, universities, companies and, of course, the end-user communities, both non-professional and professional.

Living Labs use real world testing by end-users in an authentic digital, physical, and social environment. For Living Lab partners, this process ensures that emerging technologies, and the innovative products and services they enable, are fully developed before they reach the market.

The classic view of manufacturing and service businesses was as processes controlled by a management. The management had to be at least as complex as the process it controlled. In the new knowledge economy, the business process has become non-linear and more complex. Adding more complexity to management simply increases bureaucracy. More and more companies are passing over some control from management to the process – to empower people.

Helsinki-Tallinn Euregio and Living Labs

Helsinki-Tallinn Euregio has established good working relations with Forum Virium to introduce the Living Labs programme also in Tallinn region.

Forum Virium is an organisation creating internationally competitive digital services for consumers and clients in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area through cooperation between corporations, public institutions and citizens.

Helsinki Living Lab helps promote user-driven methods and tools for improving the real-world development of products and services. Helsinki Living Lab is both a communications hub and a brand to enable companies and the public sector to get in touch and co-operate with all the different Living Labs in the Helsinki metropolitan area.

In the framework of this coopration Euregio organises network meetings between the representatives of Forum Virium, universities, municipalities of Helsinki and Tallinn region, media artists and companies dealing with provision of e-,m-, and digital services. The networking events aim at development of joint twin-region innovative public services.

Also potential IPTV services as well as cooperation on twin-region citizens’ TV are being discussed. The main partner there is m-cult.

m-cult was established in 2000 to support production, research and development of new media culture by an active involvement in the practices, policies and structures of the field. Aiming at a sustainable development of media culture, m-cult works to create productive and critical, interdisciplinary encounters between actors in culture, technology and society. m-cult focuses on social and cultural innovations in urban, wireless and participatory media, and on developing open infrastructures and transdisciplinary competences in new media culture.