Evaluating user involvement within living labs through the use of a domain landscape

Involving users in research, design and innovation processes constitutes a fast growing topic of interest for which approaches, methods and tools are abundantly described in the literature. A Living Lab is an open research and innovation ecosystem that directs user communities towards co-creation principles and where stakeholders apply various user involvement methods and tools. However, an appropriate assessment method for evaluating the degree of users´ involvement in R&D within Living Labs still has to be created. A previous paper on the topic explores the domain landscape of Living Lab research (Pallot et al., 2010) that provides an opportunity to position Living Labs on a landscape map according to the research methods applied by the stakeholders for involving users in R&D. This paper presents an empirical study on the use of the Living Lab research domain landscape as a tool for the assessment of the degree of user involvement. The domain map was found to be useful in this task and based on the results four categories of Living Labs were identified.