Moving an eInnovation from a Living Lab to the Real World: Politically Savvy Framing in ITAIDE's Beer Living Lab

Living Labs have been established as real-life pilot settings in which IT innovations are developed and validated. Once these steps have been completed, these innovations are ready to be moved out of the Living Lab environment into the real world. In many cases Living Lab innovations require not only technological but also socio-political and institutional changes to be made in order for them to be adopted. The need of sociopolitical and institutional changes becomes especially visible in cases where Living Lab participants attempt to propose innovative solutions for domains that are highly regulated. The reason for that is that in such cases, often the existing legal requirement would need to be adjusted first, in order to create grounds for the further adoption of the innovation. The question as to how to achieve such legal changes related to Living Lab innovations in a highly regulated environment has received vey limited attention. In this paper, we specifically focus on understanding of framing processes and how they are used by the Living Lab participants in a politically savvy way to mobilize a multilevel network of actors in their attempts to bring institutional change. We further investigate this framework through a case study involving a variety of framing processes that took place in the Beer Living Lab. The Beer Living Lab is part of the ITAIDE project that aims to develop and test an eCustoms solution for international trade. In addition to our contribution of the conceptual framework and the accompanying empirical case study, we also identify further implications for practitioners who are involved in similar Living Labs in highly regulated environments.