What a PICNIC!

Health-Lab, a program in the metropolitan region Amsterdam, has the ambition to create and stimulate solutions for the care of tomorrow. This program focuses on increasing the efficiency in care as well as on allowing people to be independent longer. This should be done with the help of technology but not limited to technology. In Health-lab people from care institutions, research and companies work together with the end-users to co-create solutions.

Because care is as personal as you can get, involvement of the real users is fundamental. Health-lab has set up several ‘Living Labs’ locations where real users test applications in their daily life and help designers and developers to improve their products. In this case the users are the elderly but also the professionals and informal care givers.

Reconstructed Living Lab (RLabs) is a global movement and registered Social Enterprise that provides innovative solutions to address various complex problems. It creates an environment where people are empowered to make a difference in the lives of others. The RLabs “main hub” is in Athlone, Cape Town but have activity in the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia and Central Africa with a goal of reaching all continents by 2012. RLabs and one of its programmes She’s the Geek won at the South African Blog Awards: the Best Group Blog, Best Company Blog and Best Science and Technology Blog at a very prestigious awards ceremony in Cape Town. RLabs was also a finalist and runner up for an international BEES award for the best use of mobile for 2010.

We discuss the results of a participatory design study aimed to exemplify and understand desired ambient assisted living scenarios and information sharing needs. Particularly, it presents an interactive dollhouse as a method for including the elderly in the design and requirements gathering process for residential monitoring. The results of the study indicate the importance of exemplifying ambient-assisted living scenarios to involve the elderly and so to increase acceptance and utility of such systems.

In the last few years terms like connected, intelligent or smart cities have gained popular appeal, together with an increasing association to technology innovation. Underlying methods and business models, such as data analytics or open data have become part of the dialogue. The presentation looks at data analytics in particular and discusses how it contributes to crossing the chasm between the many promises of the intelligent cities and the reality of urban organizational structures and decision-making.

We can find meaning in information through its presentation in intelligible visual paradigms and responsive user interfaces. But imposing simplicity on live data carries costs, in terms of curation, usability and processing. What analytical processes must we go through to reach the most appropriate solutions? 

Living lab Fabriken is an open maker-space located in the brand new facilities of STPLN which is an open creative community located in the Malmö (SWE) western harbour, and supported by the city council among others. Besides being a lab for experiments and processes of social and technological innovation and co-production, Fabriken also provides a platform for networking and matchmaking between the users. All activities happening at Fabriken strive to follow a sustainable, and an open source approach, which are two of the guiding principles behind the Fabriken concept. Instead of offering the users a “ready-made” lab space the infrastructure behind Fabriken is co-designed together with users in an on-going process. At the PICNIC festival design strategies behind, experiences gained, and lessons learn from this co-design process are presented.

Crowdsourcing is a very efficient and effective way for cities to gather ideas on the future of the smart city. This presentation will show how the Ghent Living Lab puts the (smart) citizen first. The citizens we serve and with whom we increasingly work together to make cities truly sustainable, inclusive and open societies. Our approach focuses on the promises and challenges of the knowledge and information society in which we as citizens live and where we need to position ourselves as cities.

In the late 20^th century cities like Manchester, seen as the ‘original, modern’ world industrial city, faced serious challenges in terms of how to respond to the massive economic restructuring that was taking place. On the one hand Manchester needed to respond to the highest rates of unemployment and social exclusion seen for more than 50 years, while, at the same time, the city wanted to develop innovative and practical solutions which could bring real economic and social benefits to local people. The impact of even more rapid technological change, referred to as the emerging ‘information society’, which started to impact from the 1980s onwards, exacerbated this dilemma, accelerating the process of restructuring so that within urban areas new economic growth increasingly sat side by side with extremes of poverty, unemployment and other forms of social exclusion. This presentation looks at the ways that Manchester responded to this and how those responses over the past 25+ years created new ambitions and aspirations for the city and its citizens. The conclusions focus on the concept of the ‘Smart City’ and Manchester’s ideas on creating a more inclusive, creative and sustainable city, including through the imaginative use of digital technologies, applications and services and a commitment to open innovation and the co-production of new and innovative services.

Nicola Villa will start highlighting a few international trends in the area of urban innovation, ICT nd sustainability. He will then present a few significative examples on how the previous 3 elements converge, and conclude with a call to action on how to accelerate innovations that will make our communities more leavable sustainable and resilient

The Euro-South Hub project wants to promote innovation and social enterprise in the Mediterranean. To this end, a virtual space is under construction to facilitate communication within the Euro-South Hub in order to promote innovation, new collaborations, to discover complementary expertise and to explore the relation between the physical world and the virtual one. We have designed the KIC model as a basis for the virtual space. It relies on a formalization of the knowledge (K), interests (I) and connections (C) of the various members of the Euro-South Hub. Natural Language Processing techniques and Social Network analysis are employed to compile user profiles and to determine how the various members cluster among each other, who are the most dominant figures and who are the individuals in brokerage positions that might play a crucial role in developing innovation. The main goal is to be able to recommend possible partners, resources and new solutions on the basis of an idea from a user.

‘Garder ses Valeurs, Changer le Reste’ is a living lab for Responsible Management. Its  long term objectives are to help our society to move faster towards a society of responsible managers. We are going to do that through “education” of large company executives, helping them to think out of the box, showing them that a responsible management is creating more shareholder value, long term as well as short term. We are partnering with Responsible executives and entrepreneurs as well as with Responsible leadership thought leaders and scholars. Short term, we are helping entrepreneurs and practicing what we intuit, in order to get scientific validation from our university partners as well as gaining insightful best practices of responsible leadership in every size/type of business.

Esteve Almirall, PhD in Management Sciences, MSc in Management and Artificial Intelligence,  serves as Associate Professor in Esade Business Schoool and UPF (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) focusing his research on Innovation, particularly Open Innovation . His research has been referenced in HBR and he is a frequent speaker in conferences around Innovation, Smart Cities, Living Labs and Open Data/Gov. Esteve is also highly involved in actual Innovation projects, local, national and European and in EU organizations where he is Council Member of the ENoLL (European Network of Living Labs), coordinates the EU projects Open Cities and Commons4Europe (Code for Europe) and participates in other EU projects on Innovation and Smart Cities.

The Flemish Living Lab Platform was launched in October 2010 to promote and support living lab research in Flanders.  Currently the platform is supporting several Smart City, Smart Grid and/or Smart Media projects.  By introducing to you some practical examples the priorities and the added value of the Flemish Living Lab platform will be explained. As ultimate goal: define some new projects to co-create our own future.

Malaga Living lab is an ecosystem of living labs and innovation and development projects carried out in and for the city. The most important characteristics of Malaga Lab include: Multi-project and Multi-domain (Energy, Smart cities, Sustainable mobility, eParticipation..); Continuity (does not depend on any one project); Openness and flexibility (very light governance structure).

China is building new Cities on a rate that global history has never witnessed. If these cities are not designed with most modern sustainability standards, it will have massive negative implications to global environment. Utilizing various LivingLab experiences we can provide healthy collaborative business with the Chinese partners. Presentation will focus on two city cases close to Shanghai where new development is taking place in user centric service designs, smart grid and metering, learning school concepts and other user centric designs.

EU2020 calls for transformation. The gap between latest research knowledge and the real life practice is huge. We need societal innovations and pioneering regions, as pathfinders and rapid prototypers. The presentation will focus on modernizing the Triple Helix to be based on the new regional innovation ecosystem concepts integrated with the Aalto University and its strategic partners and local industries. One of the main drivers of change is a new mindset which can be characterized as the Venture Garage Mindset.

The M HKA PP pervasive serious game was developed as part of the Apollon CIP EC-funded project. It is the result of cooperation between IBBT ilab.o (Belgium), Virdual (France) and M HKA (Belgium). The aim was to test the idea of cross-border living labs by developing a game that would allow museum visitors to create their own virtual collection, based on the collection they were visiting in the M HKA Antwerp museum of modern art. This presentation will discuss the idea behind the M HKA PP application and its relation to Living labs.

The World Bank ICT Knowledge Platform for Accountability of Public Service Delivery

Ilari Lindy, World Bank

The World Bank aims to support economically, socially and environmentally sustainable development through enhanced delivery, quality and accountability of ICT enabled public services through knowledge-sharing and partnerships with global knowledge leaders. 
Mr. Lindy is a Senior ICT Policy Specialist at Global ICT Unit of the World Bank and his particular interest is on innovation policy for ICT.