The idea underlying the Living Lab is to create an open environment in real-life conditions for the design, testing and validation of new products and services, where users can interact and experiment these products and services, providing the research and entrepreneurial system with very important feedbacks in terms of refinement, potential improvements and subsequent marketing: the purpose of living labs is, therefore, to stimulate innovation by moving research out of laboratories towards real-life contexts where citizens and users are encouraged to cooperate with researchers, developers and designers to contribute to the innovation process as a whole.

What is a Living Lab?

In our definition, a Living Lab is a user-driven, open innovation environment in real-life settings in which users test and experiment new products or services, in a framework integrating companies, people, research and innovation actors as well as public sector (the so-called Public-Private-People Partnership, PPPP).