In this paper, we focus on a new research area, Living Lab that introduces new ways of managing innovation processes. A Living Lab can be viewed as both an innovation milieu and an innovation approach and the aim of this paper is to clarify these two perspectives, as well as to illustrate how they can enrich each other. This is done by presenting one Living Lab milieu, Botnia Living Lab and its key components; and one Living Lab approach, FormIT and its key principles. The presentation is done on two levels, one general level and one case specific level. The case focuses on involving citizens in the design of an e-service aimed to increase their influence in a municipality and its development. Through this, we learnt that the key components of a Living Lab constitutes important structures that enhance the process and as such the principles.

Many companies are experiencing a shift from a product-based economy to a service economy. This puts pressure on companies to continuously develop their offerings and be innovative to keep their market position. To support companies' innovation processes, a concept called Living Lab has started to grow rapidly around Europe. These living labs have the endeavour to support actors such as SMEs' by offering a neutral arena where stakeholders can meet and co-develop innovations in real-world contexts. However, the impacts of living lab's operations are to some extent unexplored and under-theorised. In this paper, five basic principles for conducting living lab operations are proposed. These principles are value, openness, realism, influence, and sustainability that can be used to assess the impact of living labs. By using these principles it was shown that the living lab approach offers values in several ways to its stakeholders.

A rapid growth of technologies supporting user interaction on the internet, such as social networking sites and other virtual communities, can be seen today. These virtual communities have been shown to be of great value to companies who want to involve users in their innovation processes. However, in order to guide organisations on how to utilise their virtual communities, more knowledge is needed regarding who their users are and their motivational drivers for participating in a community. The aim of this paper therefore is to explore user characteristics and motivations to contribute to innovation processes in an innovation intermediary community. The main findings of our study indicate that users' motivation to participate is influenced by community type as well as technology adoption type. This study show that in innovation intermediary communities, one important motivational factor for users is learning.

Living Labs is a rather new research area and phenomena that introduces new ways of managing innovation processes. The underlying idea is that people's ideas, experiences, and knowledge, as well as their daily needs of support from products, services, or applications, should be the starting point in innovation. This paper illuminates experiences and accumulated knowledge to the area of concept design in an innovation process within a Living Lab. FormIT, a methodology developed for innovation processes within Living Labs is introduced through an illustration of how it has been utilised in a case. The experiences and the method are related to characteristics of Living Labs, and the paper closes with some concluding remarks in relation to concept design in a Living Lab.

The pervasive connectivity of devices enabled by Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is leading the way in various innovative services and applications. This increasing connectivity comes with its own complexity. Thus, large scale pilots (LSPs) are designed to develop, test and use IoT innovations in various domains in conditions very similar to their operational scalable setting. One of the key challenges facing the diffusion of such innovations within the course of an LSP is understanding the conditions in which their respective users decide to adopt them (or not). Accordingly, in this study we explore IoT adoption barriers in four LSPs in Europe from the following domains: smart cities, autonomous driving, wearables and smart agriculture and farming. By applying Roger’s Diffusion of Innovation as a theoretical lens and using empirical data from workshops and expert interviews, we identify a set of common and domain specific adoption barriers. Our results reveal that trust, cost, perceived value, privacy and security are common concerns, yet shape differently across domains. In order to overcome various barriers, the relative advantage or value of using the innovation needs to be clearly communicated and related to the users’ situational use; while this value can be economic in some domains, it is more hedonic in others. LSPs were particularly challenged in applying established strategies to overcome some of those barriers (e.g., co-creation with end-users) due to the immaturity of the technology as well as the scale of pilots. Accordingly, we reflect on the theoretical choice in the discussion as well as the implications of this study on research and practice. We conclude with providing practical recommendations to LSPs and avenues for future research.