A set of key principles to assess the impact of Living Labs

Many companies are experiencing a shift from a product-based economy to a service economy. This puts pressure on companies to continuously develop their offerings and be innovative to keep their market position. To support companies’ innovation processes, a concept called Living Lab has started to grow rapidly around Europe. These living labs have the endeavour to support actors such as SMEs’ by offering a neutral arena where stakeholders can meet and co-develop innovations in real-world contexts. However, the impacts of living lab’s operations are to some extent unexplored and under-theorised. In this paper, five basic principles for conducting living lab operations are proposed. These principles are value, openness, realism, influence, and sustainability that can be used to assess the impact of living labs. By using these principles it was shown that the living lab approach offers values in several ways to its stakeholders.