HSB Living Lab: A new habitat of innovation within Urban Development

Science and Technology Parks and Areas of Innovation, thanks to their openness and multistake holder nature, constitute a platform of a great range of talents and technologies able to drive collaborative innovation creation in real‐life environments. FabLabs, design centres, co‐working spaces, accelerators, corporate incubators, living labs are some examples of new habitats of innovation that many of STPs and AOI around the world have already developed in an effort to generate solutions sufficient enough to solve today’s multiplex challenges.Such open innovation ecosystems facilitate multi‐stakeholder participation and value co‐creation aswell as rapid prototyping or validation to scale up innovation and businesses.The current paper describes the case of a 3rd generation living lab created by Johanneberg SciencePark and a number of partners with the aim to facilitate and foster collaborative innovation between citizens, researchers, companies and public organizations and to build a physical arena where innovative solutions are generated and tested in real‐life environment. The living lab has alsoreceived the award for ‘first‐class innovative project’ in 2014 at the 31st IASP World conference inDoha, Qatar.In 2011, Johanneberg Science Park together with Chalmers University of Technology and one of itsreal estate partner companies, HSB, decided to co‐create within the Open Arena of UrbanDevelopment the HSB living lab (HSBLL) where owners, partners and inhabitants will not onlyparticipate in research and development, but also contribute to the whole innovation process offuture living.With this initiative, Johanneberg Science Park’s aim is to start a connection between Open Arenasand Living Labs which lies in the labs full value chain and encompasses the creation of ideas in workshops. Workshops, in which the different stakeholders (and end users) have input and create ideas based on common interests or purposes and different viewpoints and knowledge. These ideas are then prototyped in the Living Lab, where they are used and tested, on which the academics report. Improved prototypes and iterative processes with the involved stakeholders will then lead totested and validated products.