Living Labs as Open-Innovation Networks

Successful innovation development is nowadays dependent on understanding both existing and emerging user needs, through which business opportunities are developed. For that purpose, the use of living labs has emerged as a novel form of creating competences and competitive advantage. An increasing number of managers are interested in living labs as a way to transform their conventional R&D organizations to follow an open-innovation model (Westerlund and Leminen, 2011; timreview.ca/article/489). Open innovation builds on intense co-development with users and the end result is expected to better solve customers’ needs and wants. Therefore, users are innovators, co-designers, co-producers, and entrepreneurs in regard to new products and services (Pascu and van Lieshout, 2009; tinyurl.com/cmrkjlw).