Collaborative Decision-Making Processes for Local Innovation: The CoULL Methodology in Living Labs Approach

Maria Cerreta,Simona Panaro

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-78536-9_12

Abstract

AbstractThe concept of the Living Lab is closely connected to the priorities of the Europe 2020 strategy and of the Digital Agenda for Europe and is the subject of numerous user-centric open innovation programs and European projects supported by the European ENoLL Network. The chapter presents a new methodology, called Collaborative Urban Living Lab (CoULL), to support the Collaborative Decision-Making Processes to activate local innovation processes at the neighbourhood, city or landscape scale. Starting from the Quintuple Helix framework and the literature review on the Living Lab concept, its extension to the city and territorial context, and the related people-centred approaches have been discussed. The potentials to using them for putting open innovation into practice and developing innovative solutions for the cities have been shown. Nowadays, the built environments need to accelerate the transition to sustainable, climate-neutral, inclusive, resilient, healthy and smart prosperous. In the last few years, the Living Lab approaches have been promoted and used by local and international research and innovation agencies in collaboration with enterprises, NGOs and local governments to find solutions to the new issues. However, the Living Lab methodologies to guide the urban scale’s co-development solutions are few and need more accurate research and experimentations. In that direction, the CoULL methodology, tested in four different research projects (including the REPAiR project), has defined a suitable process for supporting the co-design, co-production and co-decision cycles of urban innovative and sustainable solutions.

Highlights

The recent European Union programs and activities, oriented to promote an integrated vision of innovative urban planning and design, involving citizens as “city makers” to innovate and participate in governance and policy-making, identify cities as nodes able to bring together global networks of skills, knowledge, capital, public and private value (European Commission, 2019a, 2019b, 2020)
The Living Labs approach can be implemented to design, explore, and experiment with policies, programs and projects and evaluate potential impacts, using methods and tools capable of integrating technical assessments with those of a political nature. These approaches allow analysing the changes in the relationship between the natural and built environment and the settled community, stimulating reflections oriented on the collaborative aspects of the decision-making process
The interaction between knowledge and the learning process determines the opportunity to build new relationships between communities, in which trust becomes the essential component for building shared collaborative development strategies

Summary

12.1 Introduction

The recent European Union programs and activities, oriented to promote an integrated vision of innovative urban planning and design, involving citizens as “city makers” to innovate and participate in governance and policy-making, identify cities as nodes able to bring together global networks of skills, knowledge, capital, public and private value (European Commission, 2019a, 2019b, 2020). The different existing and new research and innovation activities focused on urban issues contribute to enabling a sustainable and systemic approach to innovation through promoting cocreation, co-development and co-implementation processes, supported by new business and governance models, mobilising new partnerships and types of investments, and informing policy-making, planning and land use management. A human-centred city needs strategic research and innovation agenda focusing on eco-innovative solutions, where eco-innovation, according to European Commission (Decision N° 1639/2006/EC) and the Eco-Innovation Action Plan (EcoAP) (European Commission, 2011), can be defined as “any innovation that makes progress towards the goal of sustainable development by reducing impacts on the environment, increasing resilience to environmental pressures or using natural resources more efficiently and responsibly”. EcoAP identifies the need to promote a constructive interaction among different stakeholders, including policy-makers on various

Cerreta (B)

12.2 The Living Lab Approach: A Transformative Process

12.3 The CoULL Methodology

12.4 The CoULL Implementation in Different Decision Contexts

12.5 Conclusions