SONATA

Monitoring of nature infrastructure - Skill acquisition for Nature-based solutions

Living Lab Corner

What are Living Labs?

A Living Lab is a multi-stakeholder, real-world platform for innovation that integrates open collaboration, user engagement, and real-life experimentation. It brings together a diverse range of stakeholders to co-create, test, and implement solutions that address local problems and challenges, together with combining scientific knowledge and traditional practices.

In context of agricultural and environmental issues, these labs operate within natural and semi-natural habitats, in order to promote sustainable land management, biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration.

Living Labs rely heavily on values such as inclusivity, openness, realism and sustainability.

Who are the stakeholders?

Living Labs place strong reliance on perspective and participation of multiple stakeholders, each playing a key role in addressing local challenges, along with driving innovation and sustainability:

Knowledge institutions: Provide insights, data and scientific expertise in creating and testing new solutions.
Public actors: Provide funding, regulations and create frameworks that encourage sustainable innovation.
Private actors: Provide resources and applied knowledge in order to shape and refine innovative projects.
End-users: Provide a target group for the application of sustainable solutions, as well as real-world insight and feedback.

What are the stages of Living Lab projects?

According to the Living Lab Methodology Handbook (Evans et al., 2017), Living Labs should be established and implemented based on three main building blocks. In summary they are described as:

Exploration: Delivers the understanding of the “current state”, on-going issues that need to be solved, and existing practices. Furthermore, it involves communication with stakeholders and exchanging ideas for designing potential “future states”.
Experimentation: Includes testing of the proposed “future state” in real-life context.
Evaluation: Illustrates the impact achieved through the conducted experiment, which further enables placing the tested solutions on the market.

What are the key elements of Living Labs?

Living Labs are centered around the engagement of several key elements in real-life contexts.

Co-creation

Collaborative approach of all interested parties in designing innovative and sustainable solutions.

Co-organization

Collaborative approach of all interested parties in planning and implementing innovative and sustainable actions.

Active users involvement

Continuous and comprehensive engagement of end-users during the entirety of the process, in consideration of their perspective and needs.

Application environments

Collection of resources that will be used to run software tools aimed at end-users.

Multi stakeholders participation

Multi stakeholders participation:

Creating a network of stakeholders actively involved in the process, generating a productive and inclusive environment.

Information Communication Technology (ICTs)

Providing infrastructure and components that enable the flow on information between the interested parties.

Multi method approach

Using numerous types of methodological practices, combining their strengths in order to face the on-going social and environmental issues.

Adapted from Schuderi et al., 2023.

Living Labs and Nature-based Solutions: Where’s the link?

In order to address growing environmental challenges, it is essential to adopt and implement Nature-based Solutions as a part of the Living Labs framework. Innovations that are applied and tested within Living Labs should be nature-oriented, cost-effective, and designed to deliver tangible environmental benefits. This should be aligned with supporting the local community and contributing to their progress and development. Sharing and learning from real-life examples, and providing oportunities for informal inputs are the key enablers to implement NbS within Living Labs (Aniche et al., 2024).

References:

Aniche, L. Q., Edelenbos, J., Gianoli, A., Enseñado, E. M., Makousiari, E., DeLosRíos-White, M. I., Caruso, R., & Zalokar, S. (2024). Boosting co-creation of Nature‐based Solutions within Living Labs: Interrelating enablers using Interpretive Structural Modelling. Environmental Science & Policy, 161, 103873. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2024.103873
Evans, P., Schuurman, D., Ståhlbröst, A., Vervoot, K. (2017). Living LabMethodology Handbook. U4IoT Consortium.
Scuderi, A., Cascone, G., Timpanaro, G., Sturiale, L., La Via, G., Guarnaccia, P. (2023). Living Labs as a Method of Knowledge Value Transfer in a Natural Area. In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2023 Workshops. ICCSA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14106. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37111-0_37
Steen, K., & Van Bueren, E. (2017). Urban Living Labs: A living lab way of working (1st ed.). AMS Institute.
Zimmermann, F., Ponomareva, A., Spagnoli, F., De Los Rios White, M. (2023). Capacity building handbook and mentoring report for the set up and implementation of Positive Energy Neighbourhoods through a Living Lab Approach. oPEN Lab Project

This project is funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe (Project SONATA GA 101159546)