Living Lab: an open and citizen-centric approach for innovation

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.