Co-Creation and User Involvement in a Living Lab : An Evaluation of Applied Methods

Living labs are only recently developing to facilitate active user involvement in an interactive setting. Research on the methodological facilitation of co-creation and user feedback in such open physical spaces is still scarce. The objectives of this paper are to identify applied methods as well as to investigate the level of user involvement in living labs to further develop theoretical insights on living labs as well as on method implementations for co-creation. A qualitative explorative approach in the form of a case study on the living lab JOSEPHS in Nuremberg is applied. This paper finds that applied methods serve either of two purposes: 1) Collecting data for innovation research, or 2) adapting co-creation to living labs. Combined accordingly, methods cover both purposes and increase user involvement. Furthermore, six factors that determine user involvement are proposed. Implications for living lab managers are provided.

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