nnovation Management in Living Lab Projects: The Innovatrix Framework

Living labs are complex partnerships, as they facilitate not only university–industry relationships but also relationships between large companies, SMEs, and startups, resulting in what is often referred to as public–private–people partnerships (4P’s) (Westerlund & Leminen, 2011). They are mostly initiated and funded by policy makers with national or regional policy objectives in mind (Katzy, 2012) where they function as “innovation intermediaries” to overcome the gap between R&D and market introduction. Surprisingly, there is a lack of studies that indicate the effectiveness of these organizations in realizing this ambition (Ballon et al., 2018). One of the main arguments relates to the complex nature of innovation activities and the abundance of potentially influencing factors on innovation outcomes. Thus, in order to better understand their effectiveness and realize the full potential of living labs as “innovation intermediaries”, there is a need for clearer reporting of living lab activities to allow benchmarking and comparing. Moreover, Leminen and Westerlund (2017) detail a variety of innovation tools available for living lab practitioners, but they also highlight the absence of structural frameworks to apply these tools. Therefore, we believe there is a need for practitioner tools specifically designed for innovation management in living labs in order to help practitioners in the selection of living lab activities and to allow more comparisons and benchmarking between different projects and living lab organizations.