FormIT – an Illustration of a Living Lab Methodology

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. 1.  All over Europe, a new type of innovation milieu is emerging, called Living Labs. The rationale behind these new milieus are to open company boundaries toward their environment and harvest creative ideas and work capabilities existing among different stakeholder groups, such as customers, competitors, providers, and the public in general. As such, it is similar in its approach to different open methodologies, e.g., open innovation [1, 2], crowdsourcing [3, 4] and involving lead users [5, 6]. In more detail, a Living Lab is a gathering of public–private partnerships in which businesses, researchers, authorities, and citizens work together for the creation, validation, and test of new services, business ideas, markets, and technologies in real-life contexts. The purpose of a Living Lab is to create a shared arena in which digital services, processes, and new ways of working can be developed and tested with user representatives and researchers. Hence, a Living Lab is an environment in which people and technology are gathered and in which the everyday context and user needs stimulate and challenge both research and development, since authorities and citizens take active part in the innovation process. Since Living Labs is a rather new research area and phenomena, the amount of supporting theories for understanding the concept is limited. Further, though there exist a plethora of methodologies, methods, and tools used in individual emerging as well as mature Living Labs, there is a lack of systematic analyses and reflection on their suitability in different contexts and situations [7]. The methodological choices often are based on habit and familiarity rather than on best practice in the field. Thus, Feurstein et al.  argue for a structuring of the approaches used in Living Labs in order to gain an overview of what is used and to what extent. While we agree that this is interesting, we argue that it is even more important to reflect on how the methodology and methods used reflect the spirit of the Living Labs approach. The aim of the paper is to contribute with experiences and accumulated knowledge to the area of concept design in a Living Lab milieu. More precisely, the purpose is to present a methodology called FormIT [8, 9] and to reflect on its suitability in a Living Lab milieu and how it harmonies with Living Labs characteristics. In this paper, we focus on the concept design phase of the methodology, since the foundation of failure often seems to be established at the very beginning, even if it is not recognised until the end of the development process . Hence, this is where the conditions for the remaining processes are set. Moreover, it is here we can shift perspective from problems to opportunities and from requirements to needs [8, 9]. In the following, we present the concept Living Lab and its key principles. Subsequently, we introduce FormIT, followed by a description of our research method and the case used to illustrate the living practise of FormIT. Thereafter, we discuss and reflect on FormIT’s suitability related to Living Labs. The paper ends with some concluding remarks.