Tingan Tang from Active Life Village team at Urban Mill presented his PhD thesis 15.8.2014:

”With the continuous advances of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) such as Ubiquitous Computing, Mobile Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), users’ living contexts and daily life activities are increasingly digitalized. Based on these developments and other enabling factors, an emerging user- and context-driven open innovation approach called ”Living Lab” has recently gained rising popularity and momentum in both academia and industry.

As an emerging and promising innovation approach, many theoretical and empirical insights are needed to understand the dynamics of Living Labs. This thesis focuses on Living Labs innovation in the digital services domain and it addresses three aspects of Living Labs: Concept, Architecture and Methods.

The relative paucity of research on Living Labs advocates an exploratory approach that augments the research status quo with qualitative and quantitative empirical insights. The insights are gained from both a literature review and many years of Living Lab practice experiences from several Living Lab project cases in both academia and industry. The first aspect explores the Living Lab concept. A Living Lab concept framework is proposed by studying the key innovation principles of Living Lab and comparing the Living Lab principles with the corresponding Web 2.0 principles. The second aspect deals with the technical architecture of the Living Lab infrastructure. A ubiquitous Living Lab services platform is proposed and implemented by combining social media and the Web of Things. A common Living Lab technical architecture is generalized based on several Living Lab projects implementation experiences. A Web-based two-layered integration technical framework is proposed to integrate heterogeneous smart devices into business processes, and this framework is evaluated in a real-life elderly care case. The third aspect studies the methods used in Living Lab. A Living Lab process model and methods taxonomy are proposed and evaluated. Two case studies by different Living Lab methods are presented. Finally, a comparison of different Living Lab methods is summarized. The three studied Living Lab aspects are not separated from each other but intertwined in the whole Living Lab context for digital services innovation.

Overall, this thesis advances a better understanding of the Living Labs innovation paradigm.”

Publications included to thesis:

[Publication 1]: Tang, T., Wu, Z., Hämäläinen, M. and Ji, Y.. From Web 2.0 to Living Lab: an Exploration of the Evolved Innovation Principles. Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, VOL. 4, NO. 4, pages 379 – 385, November 2012.
[Publication 2]: Tang, T., Wu, Z., Karhu, K., Hämäläinen, M. and Ji, Y.. Internationally Distributed Living Labs and Digital Ecosystems for Fostering Local Innovations in Everyday Life. Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, VOL. 4, NO. 1, pages 106 – 115, February 2012.
[Publication 3]: Tang, T., Wu, Z., Hämäläinen, M. and Ji, Y.. Internationally Distributed Digital Ecosystems Infrastructure and Networked Living Labs Approach for Everyday Life Innovation. International Journal of Social Computing and Cyber-Physical Systems, Submitted, 15 pages, 2014.
[Publication 4]: Wu, Z., Itälä, T., Tang, T., Zhang, C., Ji, Y., Hämäläinen, M. and Liu, Y.. A Web-based two-layered Integration Framework for Smart Devices. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, VOL. 2012, NO. 1, pages 1 – 12, April 2012. doi:10.1186/1687-1499-2012-150 View at Publisher
[Publication 5]: Tang, T. and Hämäläinen, M.. Beyond Open Innovation: the Living Labs way of ICT Innovation. Interdisciplinary Studies Journal, VOL. 3, NO. 4, pages 15 – 23, March 2014.
[Publication 6]: Tang, T. and Hämäläinen, M.. Comparison of two local social media services in Finland and China by social network analysis. International Journal of Social Network Mining, VOL. 1, NO. 2, pages 209 – 224, December 2012.
[Publication 7]: Tang, T., Cheng, C. and Hämäläinen, M.. Everyday Life Sensing by Living Lab approach. Journal of Software, VOL. 9, NO. 6, pages 1545 –1552, June 2014.

Whole: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-60-5741-5