Living labs provide reality checks for satnav prototypes

Living labs provide a valuable reality check on new ideas and prototypes. The satellite navigation community is embracing this marriage of users, researchers and industry, delegates heard at the recent kick-off of the 2011 European Satellite Navigation Competition (ESNC) in London.

Interest in living labs (LL), often described as a 'user-centred, open-innovation ecosystems', has grown among research and user communities as a way of co-developing new ideas and technologies.

Space and satellite navigation technologies can draw on what Roberto Santoro calls the power of innovation platforms made up of public-private-people-partnerships (4Ps) of firms, agencies, universities and users.

“Regions around Europe got together around this idea and created 4Ps supporting innovation in their territory,” Santoro, President of the European Society of Concurrent Engineering (ESoCE Net), told the audience at ESNC’s launch on 11 May.

Roberto Santoro. ©Christian Nielson

Getting user and developer communities to embrace European satellite navigation systems and developments such as EGNOS, GNSS and ultimately Galileo is a stated aim of the European Commission and other stakeholders. Here, living labs can help because they are built on user-centric principles and thus have much to offer the Galileo community in terms of synergy and energy, suggested Santoro. “It is not inventors who make an idea a success. It’s the users who co-create successful products and services,” he said.

This is where the GNSS Living Lab Special Topic Prize comes in. When it was introduced to the ESNC in 2010, as part of the FP7 project 'GAINS', the prize co-organiser Santoro was not completely sure how it would pan out, but it proved a huge success: “I was surprised at the interest shown in the Living Lab Prize,” he confessed. But LLs have since proven to be an attractive way of not only testing innovations under semi-real conditions, but also creating new business opportunities and ventures, exploiting synergies with regional initiatives and funding programmes, and creating added value for the GNSS market.

Just married!

Evaluators received 57 ideas for the 2010 LL Prize, which they whittled down first to 10 finalists and then to a winner for each of the three themes:

• GNSS for health, ageing and inclusion;
• GNSS for energy efficiency and environment; and
• Media and participation.

Today, according to Santoro, the winners are “happily married” with three well-matched living labs that had entered a so-called 'match-making' event held in the months after the ESNC award ceremony. Prize money of €10 000 was given to each of the three innovative GNSS-related ideas, and a further €20 000 was given to their living lab ‘partners’. Due to its success, the GAINS consortium plans to apply the same themes and two-phased approach this year.

For the first phase of the prize, developers and users are invited to submit proposals under the three themes for GNSS-related products and services. The proposals should be ready to be tested and ideally implemented in a suitable living lab. The Winner will be announced at the ESNC Awards Ceremony in Munich on 19 October 2011.

In the second phase of the competition, the 2011 winner will again be 'married off' to a suitable living lab to help carry out six-month pilot trials, starting in early 2012. The trials give users the opportunity to 'interact' with the product or service, and perhaps add design features or suggest changes.

Of course, the relationship between living lab and innovator goes beyond this six-month honeymoaon phase, joked Santoro. The competition is a basis for greater synergy among natural partners who stand to benefit from better “connectivity with living labs worldwide”.

More information:

• Next generation navigation system scoops 2010 GSA Prize