Methods and Techniques for User Contribution : Challenges from a Living Lab Perspective

This paper discusses user contribution in innovation processes from a Living Labperspective. We view Living Lab as a milieu in which specific methods are used to involvedifferent stakeholders in open innovation processes to create and validate IT-products andservices in a real world setting. The involvement of different stakeholders is of particular importance in a Living Lab to secure the development of usable products and services. In thispaper we focus on methods and techniques for user contribution in innovation processes by discussing our own experiences based on 100 activities conducted within four differentresearch projects. The purpose of this paper is to discuss our experiences of methods andtechniques for user contribution in relation to three different aspects: a) phase in the innovation process, b) kind of user contribution and c) type of users, all in relation to a Living Lab perspective. We conclude that there is a need to translate face to face methods and techniques to distributed user involvement activities to be able to scale up and use these in a Living Lab setting