Openness in living labs : facilitating innovation

Innovation has come to replace efficiency and quality as the main source of competitive advantage for firms from the 1990s onwards. Hence, to an increasing extent, organisations need to consider in which ways they can achieve higher levels of innovative thinking and flexibility. Moreover, the creation of today's complex systems of products, services and processes requires a merging of knowledge from diverse perspectives, e.g. disciplinary or skill-based. One common way to meet these challenges is to set up boundary crossing collaborative groups. The idea is that innovative processes can be fertilised by having people with differentiated knowledge collaborating. Knowledge necessary for innovation and product/service development is, therefore, increasingly distributed both within and across organisations or other types of stakeholders, posing new challenges. To manage these challenges one new approach is evolving, called Living Labs. In this paper we present an innovative development process of a mobile service, taking a Living Lab approach. This paper focus on the effects of openness in an innovation process supported by a Living Lab approach for development of mobile services. The study shows that the innovation process was remarkably shortened in the open and multi-perspective process.Godkänd; 2010; 20101130 (ann_joh