A Review of Living Lab Research and Methods for User Involvement

Abstract

Living lab initiatives attempt to solve challenges by stimulating innovative collaboration and outcomes, which unfold in multifarious activities. This study investigates the progress of Living lab research over time. It explores its current trends, along with methods and tools used by Living labs for user involvement. By employing a two-step approach, the study first presents a bibliometric analysis of 535 publications, including detection of convergence towards areas like the aging problem of societies, smart cities, Urban Living labs, and overall sustainability. Urban Living lab clusters have been growing rapidly and forming their own research domain. Subsequently, a review of 42 empirical papers explores the methods and tools adopted by Living labs for user involvement during the innovation process. We categorize the methods into the following eight groups: 1) Structured interaction, 2) Flexible interaction, 3) Extended network, 4) Special actors, 5) Learning & engaging, 6) Design & approaches; 7) Techniques, 8) Operational guidelines. The study contributes both to theoretical and practice-oriented Living lab research and offers potential support especially to practitioners.

Keywords

• bibliometric analysis
• co-creation
• literature review
• living lab
• user involvement