A Taxonomy of Factors Influencing Drop-Out Behaviour in Living Lab Field Tests

Abstract

The concept of a “living lab” is a relatively new research area and phenomenon that facilitates user engagement in open innovation activities. Studies on living labs show that the users’ motivation to participate in a field test is higher at the beginning of the project than during the rest of the test, and that participants have a tendency to drop out before completing the assigned tasks. However, the literature still lacks theories describing the phenomenon of drop-out within the area of field tests in general and living lab field tests in particular. As the first step in constructing a theoretical discourse, the aims of this study are to present an empirically derived taxonomy for the various factors that influence drop-out behaviour; to provide a definition of “drop-out” in living lab field tests; and to understand the extent to which each of the identified items influence participant drop-out behaviour. To achieve these aims, we first extracted factors influencing drop-out behaviour in the field test from our previous studies on the topic, and then we validated the extracted results across 14 semi-structured interviews with experts in living lab field tests. Our findings show that identified reasons for dropping out can be grouped into three themes: innovation-related, process-related, and participant-related. Each theme consists of three categories with a total of 44 items. In this study, we also propose a unified definition of “drop-out” in living lab field tests.

Keywords

• drop-out
• field test
• Living lab
• taxonomy
• user engagement
• user motivation