COLL Living Labs

www.coll-livinglab.org

Compare Testlab and Karlstad University is part of a Living Lab project. The aim of this project is to build on and improve the work of existing Living Labs and generate knowledge on how to innovate new services, media and infrastructure in Living Labs in three different Nordic countries.

A central premise is that services only become valuable in use. Quality perceptions and experiences are formed in use or during consumption. Value is co-created with customers or users and assessed in the context of its intended use. Companies that aim to develop innovative products or services should place a stronger emphasis on understanding the users’ value creation processes, resource constellations available for users and the relationship between the quality of the technical solutions and user perceived quality. It is critical to identify and understand mechanisms in which value emerges for a customer or a user and its relationship to the technological platform for the service.

Users should be invited and given the opportunity to act as co-creators in an innovation system, particularly evident in development of new ICT infrastructure, services and media.In the project, research from disciplines such as computer science, psychology, marketing, e-health, media and communications, electrical engineering, information engineering and economics and business will be combined in order to contribute to the field of service research where the issue of how to integrate users in co-creation of new services, media and infrastructure is a highly relevant issue.

Compare Testlab - Karlstad, NettOp - University of Stavanger, and CNP - Aalborg University, are three living labs for development of new ICT-services, infrastructure and media by means of involving users (i.e. end users as well as companies). The industrial partners Ipark (Stavanger Innovation Park), ICTNORCOM, and the Greater Stavanger Development will present real cases to which users will be invited to co-create and test ICT services.

Research suggests that there is a lack of knowledge (a ‘knowledge gap’) when it comes to how best to involve the user in the innovation process, something that is as relevant in business as it is in academia. The premise of the three Living Labs is that they constitute a fruitful combination of organizational structures and technical platforms which can facilitate (bridge the gap) in the involvement of users in the innovation of new ICT-services, media and infrastructure.

Participants from Karlstad University is Computer Science and CTF - Service Research Center.