# Senior Living Lab: An Ecological Approach to Foster Social Innovation in an Ageing Society
## 2 Background  
### Living Labs  
The living lab is a concept introduced by professor [PERSON] at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) [6]. In its first meaning, the focus was on the observation of the living patterns of people inhabiting a smart house for several days. The basic idea that still remains in all of the current instantiations of the living lab concept is to include the users in a value-creation process. According to [PERSON] et al. [6] _\"Living Labs are standing at the crossroads of different society trends like citizens engaged into a more participative approach, businesses and local authorities as well as user communities are gathering within public-private-people partnership initiatives. They are also at the crossroads of different paradigms and technological streams such as Future Internet, Open Innovation, User co-Creation, User Content Creation and Social Interaction (Web2.0), Mass Collaboration (i.e., Wikipedia), and Cloud Computing where the Internet is the cloud, also named \"the disappearing IT infrastructure\".\"_  
Nowadays, the living lab concept is broader, and multiple definitions exist. This has brought forward the creation of different entities that coexist under the same large umbrella concept of living lab. In Europe, in order to coordinate the work, provide best practices and to disseminate the results achieved in the different living labs, an international federation of benchmarked living labs has been birthed: The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) [7]. According to the definition of the ENoLL [8] \"_Living Labs are defined as user-centred, open innovation ecosystems based on a systematic user co-creation approach integrating research and innovation processes in real life communities and settings. In practice, Living Labs place the citizen at the centre of innovation, and have thus shown the ability to better mould the opportunities offered by new ICT concepts and solutions to the specific needs and aspirations of local contexts, cultures, and creativity potentials._\"  
[PERSON] et al. (2013) [9] highlight the necessity of a clear conceptualization of what a living lab is. The authors assess that this is still a task in progress, but propose a four-fold categorization founded on living labs based on a literature review that empirically validated 64 ICT living labs from ENoLL. The four general living lab types that they propose are: (1) American living labs; (2) testbed-like living labs; (3) living labs focused on intense user co-creation; and (4) living labs mainly as facilitators for multi-stakeholder collaboration and knowledge sharing. According to this categorization, the Senior Living Lab has a closer relation with the third typology of living labs, in which the main goal is the co-creation of new services and products and the collection of information on the usage context with ethnographic approaches. According to [PERSON] et al., \"_These Living Labs can focus on the early development phases of needs analysis and (iterative) design, where, based on an identified problem, a solution is developed in close interaction with end-users._\". We prefer this categorization to the one proposed by [PERSON] et al. [10] for different reasons. This last categorization proposes to differentiate living labs based on which actor drives their activities: utilizer-driven, enabler-driven, provider-driven and user-driven living labs. We believe that this latter categorization poorly fits our conception of the Senior Living Lab in which all of the actors play an important role. Certainly, the final users are at the center of the laboratory (thus, the Senior Living Lab is closer to user-driven living labs) but a consistent effort has been required to balance and take into account the impact of all of the different stakeholders. In the co-creation process of the Senior Living Lab, we have considered the previous definitions focusing in particular on the necessity of adopting an ecological approach around the final users, i.e., the older adults.