A Living Lab research approach for mobile TV

More and more, a user-centered approach is adopted for information and communication technologies (ICT) innovation research. One of the recently emerging concepts within this research tradition is the so-called ‘Living Lab’. Within this paper, we argue that the Living Lab-concept is closely linked to the notion of ‘open innovation’, the ‘interactionist’ stance regarding user research and concepts from the social shaping of technology such as ‘social learning’ and ‘innofusion’. We explore the origin and roots of this concept, explain the different visions and review a bottom-up approach of Living Lab-characteristics. We then present a concrete application of Living Lab-research into the possibilities of mobile TV, a notable example of ICT-innovations that incorporates the convergence of mobile telephones and television. This research was carried out within Flanders’ mobile TV trial ‘MADUF’ and echoes a long tradition of interactive and digital TV trials. We describe the different research steps and the most notable results they yielded, and relate these to the characteristics of the Living Lab-concept in the first part of the paper. We also propose an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of Living Lab-research based on this case study. This way, we contend that a Living Lab-approach might serve as a way to meet the challenges posed to companies when developing ICT-innovations in general and seems suited for innovation research into television technologies in particular, but that certain issues remain to be tackled in order to optimize this kind of research.