Over the past decade, open innovation (OI) literature has extended its scope beyond strictly economic contexts to the context of societal value creation. This has given rise to the notion of (local) distributed knowledge as a driver for sustainable innovation and has highlighted the importance of multi-stakeholder collaborations in new product development (NPD) processes to develop new ICT systems for complex urban issues. Several studies have discussed sustainable stakeholder ecosystem architectures for such collaborations. However, little is known about stakeholder identification and selection processes for collaborations in the urban environment. By combining action research with a case study design, this paper studies the nature of contextualized interactions between knowledge actors in the ecosystem and the processes of attraction, identification, selection, and activation of stakeholders in an urban living lab (ULL). These insights converge in the development of a ‘stakeholder acupuncture framework’, which structures mechanisms and practices within dynamic collaboration ecosystems and defines key boundary conditions for such open-ended ecosystems.

The year 2006 is the ‘official’ start of European Living Labs as the movement gained real momentum through European policy measures, culminating in the birth of the pan-European network ENoLL (European Network of Living Labs)

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into corporate environments becomes essential for enhancing efficiency, decision-making, and fostering innovation. While AI adoption has successfully optimized specific operational processes, the holistic deployment of AI aimed at empowering employees remains underdeveloped. This letter introduces the concept of the “AI Living Lab” within corporate environments, designed to accelerate AI adoption, foster innovation, and enhance employee productivity and satisfaction. The concept appeared as a response in Continental Automotive to the problem of faster adoption time and scaling of AI-Empowered Employee solutions inside the company. Through a current observation on the state of the art, Continental Automotive’s AI Living Lab as a case study, and identification of existing gaps, this letter suggests future research areas for a scalable AI Living Lab framework in corporate settings.