User Involvement in Living Lab Research: Experiences from an Interdisciplinary Study on Future Mobile Applications

Open and user-driven innovation strategies seem to have influenced the shift beyond the ‘technology push’ perspective, which has dominated for a few decades and which minimizes the importance of social and user-related dimensions in the context of ICT development, adoption and diffusion. Although ‘the consumer’ has always been important to a certain degree, companies are now even more forced to put users (as key stakeholders) and customerunderstanding at the core of their innovation strategies in order to sustain a strong market position and to pursue product development that doesn’t neglect the user. As a result, the traditional user research arsenal has also been extended with alternative analytical methods and tools from various disciplines (such as design, foresight, anthropology, ...). These methods tend to focus on people’s behavior, future needs, emotions, ... (Sleeswijk Visser, Stappers et al., 2005, p. 123) in view of the collection of those insights that are rather implicit and tacit.