Abstract
An emerging and innovative way of organizing projects in health technology and innovation is the so-called lab. Because of their characteristics, living labs may provide a solution to a very old problem: How to facilitate the meaningful participation of stakeholders in science and technology? In this article, I (we use a first-person perspective in the paper) aim to contribute to the literature by providing an account of my experiences as a participation researcher with stakeholder participation in a living lab in the Netherlands. I participated in a yearlong project on ensuring freedom for residents in a closed psychogeriatric ward. Using three key moments from that experience, I illustrate why participation was the intention, but was harder to achieve in practice. Participation processes and living labs are in specific social and physical contexts. I discuss the of living labs and propose to reconceptualize them as situated practices: The value of a living lab lies in the processes of work it conducts on specific innovations in its local context. A key conclusion is that providing narrative descriptions of living lab projects, with attention to situatedness and stakeholder participation, can provide invaluable examples, insights, and inspirations for other researchers in the field.
Highlights
An emerging and innovative way to organize projects in health technology and innovation has arisen, called a “living lab”
Even though no consensus on a single definition of “living labs” has yet been reached, this useful definition is provided by Westerlund and Leminen (2011): “They [living labs] are physical regions or virtual realities where stakeholders form public-privatepeople partnerships (4Ps) of firms, public agencies, universities, institutes, and users all collaborating for creation, prototyping, validating, and testing of new technologies, services, products and systems in real-life contexts.”
Two major benefits of this have been described in the literature that apply to the use case at stake in this research, that is, the wards of a nursing home
Summary
An emerging and innovative way to organize projects in health technology and innovation has arisen, called a “living lab”. Living labs are small public-private partnerships where multiple stakeholders, including end-users, collaborate around shared challenges in a real-life setting (Geenhuizen, 2014; Westerlund et al, 2018a; Westerlund et al, 2018b; Hossain et al, 2019). Even though no consensus on a single definition of “living labs” has yet been reached, this useful definition is provided by Westerlund and Leminen (2011):. “They [living labs] are physical regions or virtual realities where stakeholders form public-privatepeople partnerships (4Ps) of firms, public agencies, universities, institutes, and users all collaborating for creation, prototyping, validating, and testing of new technologies, services, products and systems in real-life contexts.”. Because of the real-life setting, close collaboration with, and meaningful participation by relevant stakeholders may be facilitated
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