According to the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), Living Labs are open innovation ecosystems in real-life environments based on a systematic user co-creation approach that integrates research and innovation activities in communities, placing citizens at the centre of innovation. At the heart of any type of Living Lab there is the user drive process because Living Labs actively and directly involve, throughout the innovation development process, end-users, be that citizens, patients or that final person or group that innovation is made for. Living Labs operate as intermediaries among citizens, research organisations, companies and government agencies for joint-value co-creation, rapid prototyping or to scale up innovation and businesses. The key in living labs is the join-value co-creation as the methodology of living labs has in the centre all the involved stakeholders, creating value for all of them. Citizens/Patients or any other involved stakeholder do not participate just to “test” or evaluate a technology or innovation but to contribute and create value for themselves and for the other involved actors.
VITALISE project is about harmonizing health and wellbeing living labs as Research Infrastructure. VITALISE's main goal is to harmonize the access to the Health and Wellbeing Living Labs for researchers. The added value of Living Labs is the real-life observation and experimentation. And this calls for cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral and cross-border experimentation, starting from the regional ecosystems. The challenge in our case, from the RIs point of view, is that living labs can provide value only when the stakeholders from the quadruple helix are involved too. A living lab in a hospital cannot provide any value to the researchers unless patients and doctors are involved as co-creators too.
Over the last few years, Living Labs have emerged as resilient research and innovation infrastructures and have proved to be key to the integration of research and innovation processes in real life settings, focusing primarily on people and their engagement in research procedures. Living Labs can cover a wide range of the innovation cycle, starting from the design thinking phase to the scaling up of innovation. Obviously, one could think of Living Labs both as Research Infrastructures and Technology Infrastructures as well. The objective of VITALISE is to identify the main services and procedures Living Labs can provide as RIs and to provide them to external researchers in order to validate the assumption of Living Labs as RIs.
VITALISE opens up Living Lab research infrastructures as a means to facilitate and promote research activities in the Health and Wellbeing domain in Europe and beyond, by enabling in person Transnational Access to 17 Living Lab research infrastructures and by supporting remote digital access to datasets of rehabilitation, transitional care and everyday living environments through harmonised processes and common tools. VITALISE will design and develop ICT tools for shared access of similar devices and applications used across Living Labs. Lastly, VITALISE will invest in the development of training methods towards the wider understanding and valorisation of Living Lab methodologies in the research community.
