Firing Up the City: A Smart City Living Lab Methodology

We position Living Labs as a research and development methodology that allows the creation of products and services at the overlap between top-down and bottom-up Smart city perspectives. First, the concept of Living Labs and Smart Cities are introduced and their understanding and implementation are discussed underpinning this study. This is followed by drawing out the two case studies so as to yield insight into the way the Living Labs were conducted, and which is structured along ten hases. We explain how these different phases involved a broad set of stakeholders, from different parts of society such as city employees of local NGOs and city administrators, neighborhood inhabitants, engineers, designers and artists. We also highlight how the collaboration of these different stakeholders gave rise to open innovation in a Living lab context.