Extended Description

The CoreLabs objective is to achieve a co-ordination of activities towards the establishment of co-creative Living Labs as the foundation of a Common European Innovation Infrastructure on several levels.

A Living Labs is a “functional region” where stakeholders has formed a Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) of industries, SMES, public agencies, universities, institutes and people collaborate for creation, prototyping, validating and testing of new services, products and systems in real-life contexts. Such contexts are cities, villages and rural areas as well as industrial plants.

Real-life Living Labs are superior to “closed Labs” in virtually all aspects; it stimulates new ideas, provides richer contexts of concrete R&D challenges and it becomes natural to perform early and continuous validation (not just prototype-testing at the end). Concepts are developed in full-day (user) contexts (users are not viewed as “workers”, “patients”, “travellers” or “citizens” separately).

The activities to be co-ordinated towards that goal are:
• The harmonisation of existing and emerging Living Labs
• Initiatives within current and future CWE research initiatives (primarily Integrated Projects)
• Regional, national and IST RTD programmes
• All stakeholder organisations(public, academic, civic, industry, SMEs, etc..)

The project will work in close co-operation with the four Integrated Projects in the area of Living Labs that were funded under the same call, EU IST FP6 Call 5 and also within the CWE unit. These projects are:
• Collaboration@Rural – “intends to promote the introduction of collaborative working environments as key enablers of sustainable development in rural areas..C@R will propose a technological response to the barriers preventing rural development and will use the living labs methodology as a way to involve rural constituency in RTD activities addressing collaborative technologies”
• Laboranova – “The goal of Laboranova is to create this next generation Collaborative Tools which will change existing technological and social infrastructures for collaborating and support knowledge workers and eProfessionals in sharing, improving and evaluating ideas systematically across teams, companies and networks. Laboranova will do research to develop and integrate models and tools in three specific areas, the three pillars in the project: ideation, connection and evaluation”
• WearIT@work “will prove the applicability of computer systems integrated to clothes, the so-called wearables, in various industrial environments”.
• CoSpaces – “Innovative Collaborative Work Environments for Individuals and Teams in Design & Engineering.”

TSSG are leaders of Work Package 3 – Systemic Innovation of CWE Validation Approaches. This work package is responsible for the identification of the innovative aspects of a network of Living Labs across the specified CWE Integrated Projects (IPs). As part of this process, activities include defining the technical and organisational pre-requisites and requirements necessary for the creation of a European Network of Living Labs (ENLL) and also the specification of a suitable validation approach. WP3 will also define a suitable technological reference architecture that can be used in design of an ENLL. The results of the above activities will be analysed and the potential that ENLL can have for mass-customisation and deployment of new products will be identified. Finally the work package will relate the findings of the activities to the CWE IPs and assist them in adopting the specified validation approaches. The process will follow several iterations as the IPs will provide feedback on the relevance the approach has to their objectives.

The BrainBridges consortium is made up of the following partners:
• Centre of Distance-spanning Technologies, CDT (SE) (coordinator)
• Bremen Institute of Industrial Technology & Applied Work Science (DE)
• Helsinki School of Economices (FI)
• TSSG, Waterford Institute of Technology (IE)
• Bremen Innovation Agency (DE)
• ESoCE NET (IT)
• Fachhochschule Vorarlberg(AT)
• Turku Area Development Centre (FI)
• Telematica Institut (NL)
• PROMEI (HU)
• NOKIA (FI)
• IBM (BE)
• ATOS ORIGIN (ES)