CoVID-19 combat pushing for the urgent need of Urban Living Lab or Innovation Lab for any Smart Cities Development

The world is responding to COVID-19 in precedented or unprecedented manner to respond, recover and prepare our city to be more and more resilient. As technology has got a prima focus in the combat with this humanitarian crisis of the highest order, pandemic COVID-19. There has the situation of pandemic got us alarmed and hit the socio-economic-political-environmental and other external influences which can definitely going to take a good chunk of time to let us thrive again.

Well coming back to address the technology interventions what every other local as well as national level governments started exploring and calling every other experts to brainstorm over webinars, podcasts and several other platforms, has been found well addressed through several smart cities projects. In fact, each smart cities or the future of the cities are entitled to have a very cohesive and collaborative approach of urban living labs and city innovation labs.

The major missing and yes most of the cities has ignored its importance, as a result this pandemic bought more of time to spread globally. Each local government could have responded very well through design thinking and problem solving attitude of the local communities. The integral stakeholdership of the citizens could have played much better and faster way of bringing out more diversity and efficient smart and innovative solutions to combat this pandemic. 

We always advocated citizen centric smart cities development and yes then why not even responding this crisis with more solidarity, especially by approach of citizen and stakeholders consultations with approach of ‘Inform, Consult, Involve, Collaborate and Empower’. At least we could have saved and acted within stipulated time by innovating as well as designing-developing the solid pandemic proof smart solutions. As we try and make sense of the current crisis, the need for systems thinking stands out - to be able to think through, and anticipate, second and third-order effects of the pandemic. The lack of such thinking is in many ways what got us here, facing not just a public health emergency, but also an economic and humanitarian crisis. We have made an organizational decision to turn most of our attention over the next 6-12 months towards understanding these second and third-order effects, and identifying the pathways through which we can build back better.

The current crisis has made these even more urgent priorities. What is the role of think tanks, and more broadly policy researchers, in such a context? How does one combine actionable research with systemic foresight? Equally, how we adapt our research methods? We prided ourselves on combining ethnographic methods and policy insights, bridging top and bottom, but how does one do this in a time of social distancing? Do we need new tools? Or is this an opportunity to fundamentally re-think conventional research practices - to let the subjects of our research be the ones documenting what is happening to them, through digital testimonies?

Its not always about emerging technologies or disruptive technologies as solutions, we have to work on social domain too this time. Living labs are generally known as a way to manage innovation processes in an open, inclusive, and collaborative approach in which the innovations are developed by engaging various stakeholders including public organizations, private sectors, universities, and citizens.

In a Living Lab, the aim is to accomplish quattro helix by harmonizing the innovation process among four main stakeholders: companies, users, public organizations and researchers. These stakeholders can benefit from the Living Lab approach in many different ways, for instance companies can get new and innovative ideas, users can get the innovation they want, researchers can get study cases and public organizations can get increased return on investment on innovation research. Considering the key components of a “generic” or “traditional” living lab, five of them are well-known: 1) ICT and infrastructure; 2) management; 3) partners and users; 4) research; and 5) approach

Living Labs a Three Layer Model:

MACRO ULL: Living Lab constellation consisting of organized stakeholders (PPP-Partnership) for Open Innovation: Knowledge transfers between organizations.

MESO ULL: Living Lab innovation projects using Living Lab methodologies for Open & User Innovation: Real life experimentation, active user involvement, multi-method and multi-stakeholder.

MICRO ULL: Individual Living Lab research steps and activities linked to the stakeholders’ assets and capabilities for user Innovation: User involvement & contribution for innovation.

Many different types of Living Lab environments are as follows:

1. Research Living Labs focusing on performing research on different aspects of the innovation process.

2. Corporate Living Labs that focus on having a physical place where they invite stakeholders (e.g. citizens) to co-create innovations.

3. Organizational Living Lab where the members of an organization co-creatively develop innovations.

4. Intermediary Living Labs in which different partners are invited to collaboratively innovate in a neutral arena.

5. A time limited Living Lab as a support for the innovation process in a project. The Living Lab closes when the project ends.

Some of the popular living lab or innovation lab projects are:

The UNaLab project: The UNaLab project aims to develop smarter, more inclusive, more resilient, and increasingly more sustainable societies through innovative nature-based solutions. The UNaLab partners (including 10 municipalities and members from research, business, and industry) commit to address the challenges that cities around the world are facing today, by focusing on climate and water-related issues, within an innovative and citizen-driven paradigm. UNaLab has three front-runner cities, Eindhoven, Genova, and Tampere, each with a track record of employing smart, citizen-driven solutions for sustainable development. 

U4IoT (User engagement for Large Scale Pilots on the Internet of Things) combines complementary expertise encompassing social and economic sciences, communication, crowdsourcing, living labs, co-creative workshops, meet ups and personal data protection to actively engage end users and citizens in the large scale pilots.

Challenges and opportunities of creating a city-wide test bed for digital innovation:

Exploration: Creating a trusted ecosystem and local community around interdisciplinary or specific city level thematic topics. Giving the floor to bottom up projects and citizen/user driven initiatives – solving real life challenges.

Engagement: Willingness/Motivation of end users to participate in experimentation processes/projects. Giving equal chance to all, empower everyone to innovate!

Evaluation: Outreach and motivation: providing the right sample for the Living Lab project evaluation; sharing and standardizing data and handling privacy issues. Disrupt and transform! Throughout a thorough, iterative feedback process receiving a reliable feedback ensuring safe entry to market or investments decisions.

Experimentation: Finding the right experts and the project constellation, different needs of transnational peers. Multidisciplinary, Pan-European and global participation.

Entrepreneurial aspect: Proving business readiness and sustainability aspect of the Living Lab “to be”. Market creation potential

In essence, the Living Lab concept refers to a set of (quantitative and qualitative) methodologies and tools for the co-creation and validation of innovation together with the end users in real-world environments. Urban Living Labs provide a 'safe space' for collaboration and a test bed for innovation, going beyond business-as-usual and demonstrating the potential of alternative ways of thinking. To maximize learning and opportunities for innovation, we are developing a portfolio of Urban Living Labs that span a range of urban development types and environmental contexts across the country. The processes of governance have standardized some tools to be used in public policy context supposed to define way to capture and respond to the social, urban and territorial demand of transformations. 

Coronavirus: we’re in a real-time laboratory of a more sustainable urban future

The coronavirus crisis has offered a new perspective on these problems – and the limits of the way we have run our urban world over the last few decades. Cities are key nodes in our complex and highly connected global society, facilitating the rapid flow of people, goods and money, the rise of corporate wealth and the privatization of land, assets and basic services. This has brought gains for some through foreign travel, an abundance of consumer products, inward investment and steady economic growth. This crisis has revealed the significant inequalities in people’s ability to move about cities. In many countries, including my own (the India), Millions face transport poverty, where they can’t afford to own and run a car, and lack access to affordable mass transit options. This has taken a new twist during this crisis. For many vulnerable people, whether there is a transit system to access hospitals, food and other essential services can be a matter of life or death.

COVID-19 clearly presents a significant juncture. There is still trauma and loss ahead. There may be market collapse and a prolonged depression. There are also tendencies towards political and corporate bodies exploring this crisis for their own ends.Urban Living Labs provide a co-innovative setting, in which multiple stakeholders jointly test, develop and create metropolitan solutions. Living Labs are an attractive way to test, create and develop metropolitan solutions that will be adopted more smoothly and swiftly by all stakeholders involved. 

These labs could have been instrumental to find out:

• How well does the solution address one or more challenges? 
• How innovative, sustainable and inclusive is the solution?
• What is the economic and social impact of the solution? 
• Can the solution be implemented quickly? 
• Does the solution have the potential to scale-up nationally or internationally? 

Urban living labs are ‘early experimentation gardens’ embedded in neighborhoods and cities, in which residents, governments, private actors and knowledge institutions interact to design, test and fine-tune social and technical interventions in real-time. At its heart is the idea that urban sites can provide a learning arena within which the co-creation of new ideas and solutions can be pursued. The Urban Living Lab (ULL) in Panaji will engage a range of stakeholders in finding solutions to Panaji’s challenges. By facilitating collaboration and information flow between residents, policymakers, public bodies, businesses and academia, the ULL will generate new knowledge on under-researched urban issues. Interventions will be co-created and tested out in collaboration with stakeholders, adapting to both successes and failures. International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the European Business & Technology Centre (EBTC). The agreement aimed to establish a Living Lab on the institute’s campus by 2020.

There has been a growing uptake of the living lab method for participatory urban initiatives since, focusing on four key functions: experimentation; engagement; co-creation; and learning. For Social Innovation Lab, these are steps which can be further integrated with the approach of ULL, even during this crisis:

A social innovation is any initiative (product, process, program, project or platform) that challenges and, over time, contributes to changing the defining routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of the broader social system in which it is introduced.

Who, where, why, what in Urban Living Labs

National Living Lab Smart Cities in Amsterdam, Municipalities need to talk to residents about digitization of public spaces even during the COVID-19 crisis. City Scope Andorra, a 3-D augmented-reality platform that visualizes complex urban data on a small-scale model of the country in real-time. The platform simulates the impact of multiple urban interventions from urban planning proposals to shared autonomous vehicles and facilitates civic engagement and decision making. SMARTER TOGETHER in Vienna in order to link citizens and future users with the smart solutions and maximize the outcomes on a demand-driven basis. ULL or Innovation lab could have been easily utilized to prosper provide effective response, recovery and preparedness through technologies interventions of Digital Transformation, Digital Platforms, Dashboards, Chatbots, Information Communication Technologies (ICT), Internet of Things (IoT), Arificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, Machine Learning (ML), Cloud Analytics, Predictive Analytics, Natural Language Processing Technology (NLP), Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Data Analytics, Smart Applications, ArcGIS, Cloud-based platforms, Bluetooth wireless, Open Data, Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV), Robotics, Power Business Intelligence (BI), Computational modeling, 5G, Remote monitoring Wearables, Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), Computed Tomography (CT), Mobile Monitoring Decision Support Systems etc. 

Some of the popular Smart City Innovation Lab, list of living labs, maker spaces and other testing and developing facilities geared towards smart city solutions will help companies and research institutions to further their innovations.

A.     DFKI (Germany): Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Living Lab, Ambient Assisted Living Laboratory: BAALL, Innovative Retail Laboratory – IRL, Robotics Exploration Laboratory , Smart City Living Lab, Smart Factory Laboratory and smart office space.

B.     WeLL (Belgium): The WeLL aims to put technology at the service of citizen’ wellbeing and health professionals.

C.     e-Care Lab (France): The e-Care Lab mission is to stimulate innovative products/services and design healthcare solutions for autonomy with all health stakeholders (health professionals, patients, home services and companies).

D.     Lab4Living: It is a collaborative interdisciplinary research initiative This mission is declined in three axis: developing an integrative vision of care processes to ensure a better match between the supply of technological products / related services and the needs of patients and / or practitioners; optimizing the integration of solutions developed in the process of care or in the medico social support for patients and carers; developing safer, less invasive and more targeted technical medical procedures.

E.      Doll (Denmark): Doll is based on the use of regional and local demand to develop, demonstrate and deploy new energy and resource efficient solutions to climate and energy.

F.      FZI Living Lab Smart Energy (Germany): The FZI Living Lab smart energy offers an interdisciplinary research environment for the development of solutions for the future energy system.

Like in the discussion for Participation, different levels or types of co-design can also be pointed out during the implementation process of solutions or products:

• Co-Design methods to inform and activate users and citizens
• Co-Design methods to receive feedback from users and citizens
• Co-Design methods to incorporate users and citizens directly in the development
• Co-Design methods were solutions are created by users and citizens

The Lab for Urban and Innovation enables engagement of community, design professionals, faculty and students even in this CoVID-19 crisis before this changes its course to endemic from pandemic status as coined by WHO. We could have easily designed and developed several smart solutions if we could empower citizens to make a positive impact in our city and world as they participate in real-world projects, where active, collaborative and cross-disciplinary thinking.

Currently I have been considering several sectoral challenges which have emerged during this CoVID-19.

"As we have deliberately failed to flatten the curve or to prevent spread the Corona Virus, we have been facing an enormous threat to our present as well as future generation. We must act now, to visualize the new normal."

Please feel free to write to me on my coordinates, E: [email protected]