Living Labs are an emerging Public Private Partnership (PPP) concept in which firms, public authorities and citizens work together to create, prototype, validate and test new services, businesses, markets and technologies in real-life contexts, such as cities, city regions, rural areas and collaborative virtual networks between public and private players. The real-life and everyday life contexts will both stimulate and challenge research and development as public authorities and citizens will not only participate in, but also contribute to the whole innovation process. This paper examines the state-of-the art in involving the user and stakeholder organisations into the innovation process in various ongoing, embryonic Living Labs initiatives, examines the key practices that need to be in place for the maturation of the concept and gives examples on how those are currently being deployed. The paper concludes with a section dedicated to identifying areas in which future research is required.

This paper presents the concept of semi-autonomous product-centric information management based on the Product Avatar (PA) concept, discussing the overall concept of distributed and decentralised information management relevant to individual product items and analyses the requirements the concept generates. In that context, it aims at stimulating discussion on the pragmatic utilisation of emerging technologies, such as RFID, wireless networking and ubiquitous computing. This paper further illustrates the benefits of the application of the PA concept in examples related to PLM against a scenario based on a network of organisations connected to the maintenance, repair and operation processes of a product.

The ability to be creative and innovative in a society influenced by stress, lack of time, and other factors, harnessing the technology available in today's knowledge society is key towards increasing the overall productivity of a future European society. Whilst technology enables new value-chains, product and service development increasingly need to focus on true user needs in order to be successful in today's increasingly global and competitive market. New R&D and innovation methodologies need to be developed to meet the challenge of addressing those needs. This paper examines the need for involving the user and other stakeholder organisations into the innovation process, analyses the key issues regarding regional innovation, and presents a basic concept of Living Labs as a multi-contextual R&D methodology addressing those issues. The proposed Living Labs methodology contributes to the coming challenges of mass-deployment of ICT solutions as a mean to further develop the society involving the citizens. It brings the users/consumers/citizens into the system of innovation, thereby leveraging on a larger mass of ideas, knowledge and experiences etc and substantially boosting the innovation capability.