Urban Living Labs as Exponent of Co-creation
摘要
Over the last few years, co-creation has gained momentum among companies to stimulate the participation of stakeholders inter alia, suppliers, customers, experts, and employees in the development of products and services. Teamwork technique was thus adopted to promote the sharing of ideas, creativeness and a better performance within the working group. According to the role played by the stakeholders and the opportunity for them to be included as part of the group, four types of co-creation were defined: crowdsourcing, community co-creation, coalitions, and expert co-creation. In this vein, urban living labs (ULLs) were conceived as an arena for innovation where teamworking methods are applied to integrate participants in developing products, services and processes by exploring, examining, experimenting, testing and evaluating creative proposals in real contexts. This chapter aims to characterize ULLs as interactive urban spaces where co-creation is boosted in the pursuit of solutions to overcome major urban challenges along with the achievement of the Spanish Urban Agenda as an adaptation of the 2030 Agenda to the urban realm. ULLs conducted in the Spanish city of Madrid from the beginning of the century were examined as case study to determine their contribution to the co-creation process. Findings revealed that collaborative projects prevail over co-created initiatives. Furthermore, only three out of the sixteen analysed ULLs employed prototyping workshops resulting in tangible products, by contrast to the remaining labs geared towards construction and sharing of knowledge.