An online collaboration platform between researchers and companies in living labs

Abstract

Living labs provide real-world environments that combine experimentation with concurrent innovation and change of user behaviour. It serves as a platform for collaboration among many stakeholders, being it firms, public agencies, universities, institutes or customers, to create, validate and test new services, products and theories in real-life contexts. Among this complex network, links between research community and companies represent a specific type. This paper presents an online instrument to enact the collaborative relationships between research community and companies. This instrument is more than an online survey instrument, but a combination of online survey instrument and online consultant instrument. As an illustration, studies in the area of knowledge worker productivity assessment carried out through this instrument will be given in this paper to better understand its distinguishing features. In the end, we argue that fast feedback loop and instant communications between researchers and stakeholders maintain contributions both to theory building in terms of researchers, and on the other hand to practice guidance in terms of companies.