ITECH – Living Lab
Our goal is to help design socially responsible innovations. We use the Living Labs methodology developed at MIT. Living Labs is an open innovation workspace that allows you to learn about the expectations of your target audience and co-create the final product.
Living Labs are used primarily in two types of processes. The first is projects involving citizens in decision-making (so-called Urban Living Labs). This is a form of public consultation with the difference that citizens have the right to co-determine and collaborate with policymakers and experts on specific policies, regulations or solutions to be implemented in their community In the second case, Living Labs are used as a platform that provides an opportunity for collective co-creation of technological innovations by diverse stakeholders (from creators-engineers to consumers-citizens). Through a series of workshops that engage participants in a collaborative process, Living Labs are designed to test and develop increasingly optimal versions of technological innovations before they are fully implemented.
In ITECH-Living Lab we support the creation of innovative solutions. We organize workshops to which we invite companies, researchers and users to work together on new technologies. ITECH-Living Lab’s main task is to co-create socially responsible innovations, that not only provide benefits related to technical usability, but also realize the ideas of citizen participation or sustainable development. Our Living Lab is an environment of mutual cooperation between different stakeholders which helps to achieve social acceptance of technological innovations.
In our approach, we primarily use Design Thinking methods and the User Experience approach, and rely on tools developed in the field of responsible research & innovations. The innovation work process conducted within ITECH- Living Lab is usually based on the following stages: 1) empathizing (understanding the users’ perspective), 2) experience mapping (developing target user profiles), 3) idea generation (creative workshops), 4) prototyping (developing initial solution models), 5) testing (developing initial solution usability tests). The process is tailored to each client and their specific needs. For each proces we provide a report with specific recommendations.
Main advantages of Living Labs are:
- rapid prototyping and functionality testing of new products
- rapidly improving existing solutions
- implementing the idea of responsible innovation by incorporating different perspectives.
Our offer includes:
- quantitative and qualitative social research (survey polls, focus groups, evaluation analyses)
- design and leading the facilitation processes, including public consultations
- supporting R&D activities in product optimization (workshops with users, usability tests)
- creating substantive contributions to grant proposals in the field of social responsibility of science and technology
