Living Labs and open innovation: Roles and applicability

Last decades and especially since the massive generalization of web 2.0, we have assisted to a blossoming of the role of users, either as generators of contents or as direct contributors in the innovation process. However these contributions are better characterized as lacking structure and governance making it difficult to actively build on them in terms of both business process and policy. On the other side, broadening the inflows of companies in the innovation process in order to capture the benefits of globalization posses a massive filtering problem: How to be aware, reach and select the right ideas. This problem, massive per se, becomes even greater if we include user contributions. Living Labs, small organizations that aim to capture users' insights, prototype and validate solutions in real life contexts, aim to contribute to both problems providing structure and governance to the user involvement and methodologies and organizations to filter and sense user insights. This work aims to situate their contribution in the context of Open Innovation at micro level and in Systems of Innovation at macro level while providing insights on both where are there more effective and where their main limitations lie.