Living Labs Global

Living Labs Europe - a new driver for European innovation

Living Labs Europe opens up the potentials of innovative mobile applications and technologies to European citizens, companies, researchers and investors for the purpose of pioneering mobile applications for European end-users and markets, enhance Attractiveness for visitors, residents, business and to provide a European platform for collaboration and opening innovative markets.

Across Europe, cities and regions gain comparative advantages by swiftly advancing their infrastructure for transportation and telecommunications. Cities that become nodes in cross-border networks attract business firms and investors, tourists and other visitors. More and more, ‘hub cities’ are becoming significant transaction points for global flows of goods, services, people and – ideas. They gain advantage not only for themselves but for the surrounding region and for other such coupled cities.

Throughout Europe, there are regions that tend to adapt more quickly and effectively than others to new technology, organization and other circumstances – from one generation to another.   Infrastructures of all kinds are improved and extended; public policies are up-dated to complement firm-specific assets; clusters of competencies are maintained and advanced by applied research and experimental development, education and training; cross-border linkages are utilized to renew and enforce trade and international networks of production to the benefit of the regional economy.

Currently, within the emerging knowledge-based economy, the most successful European regions or city-areas seem to be those that operate as if they were full-scale urban laboratories or regional proving grounds for prototyping and testing new technology application and new methods of generating and fostering innovation processes in real time.

These city-regions, and the firms located in them, seem to be actively riding the wave of modern information and communications technologies rather than simply adapting them. Here, professional and other user communities play a significant role in identifying needs, shaping applications, and creating effective interactions between the inventive producers and users of technology for truly innovative uses.