• • Urban & Rural Living Lab (Smart cities & regions, rural areas)
  • Living Lab as a Service (Company, SME/StartUp, Government)
  • Research Living Lab (Living Lab Master’s Degree Programme in Service Innovation and Design)
  • Living Testbed (Technology Testing)

Laurea Living Labs is “an umbrella living lab” for all our living lab activities managing coordination between the different Laurea Living Lab including (1) Laurea Activity Living Lab and (2) Laurea Simulation Lab which infrastructures are defined in more detail hereafter. As a result all co-creation facilities described here are available for Activity and Simulation labs.

Laurea has been an active member of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) since its establishment in 2006 and has hold the ENoLL presidency between 2015-2018. Our Master’s Degree Programme in Service Innovation and Design is one of the oldest one’s in the world and keeps us at the forefront of recent developments in the field.

We are professionals in orchestrating and facilitating multi-stakeholder collaboration and innovation and have around have around 80 ongoing research projects in the fields of our expertise and most of them utilises living lab and co-creation methodology. Laurea Living Labs key research areas includes:

Sustainable and versatile social and health care: (1) focusing on promotion of health, well-being, functional capacity and inclusion, (2) New skills in the social and health sector, (3) Utilization of new technologies in the social and health sector, (4) Utilization of creative methods and other co-development and service design in service development work and (5) Sustainable development in the furtherance of health and well-being.

Service Business and Circular Economy: (1) utilizes and develops new service design methods, techniques and tools to improve, innovate, and visualise the service offering, processes, and organization, (2) develops sustainable business models to promote scalable solutions, (3) co-creates and validates solutions with actual end-users in real environments, (4) helps to innovate (create new) or improve (existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for customers and efficient as well as effective for the organization.

Coherent security: (1) Understand how we could build a safer society, products and services that take into account the needs of different groups of people, (2) The safety and security of educational establishments including risk management education and training, (3) other thematic areas cover risk and crisis management (incl. resilience); hybrid threats; issues related to critical infrastructure and resilience in society, cyber security and corporate security, combating radicalisation, extremism and crime.

Laurea Living Labs operates in Helsinki-Uusimaa region, which is the second most innovative region in Europe. Laurea is alliance partner in the Health Capital Helsinki (HCH), which is a collaborative network of world-class healthcare and health R&D, and companies ranging from innovative startups to multinational corporations.

Laurea runs also a key partnership program that engages our local, regional and national partners in extensive and systematic cooperation with us. Key partners includes 61 organisation and many of them are operating in social and health care. Among these are companies, non-profit associations and public authorities managing e.g. hospitals, nursing homes, out-patient services, various social services and safety services.

Other network partnerships includes (1) The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), (2) The European Facility Management Network (EuroFM), (3) The Service Design Network (SDN), (4) ERRIN, and (5) Finnish Service Alliance (FSA website only in Finnish), (6) The European Organisation for Security (EOS), (7) The European Cyber Security Organisation (ECSO), and (8) Public Safety Communications Europe Forum (PSCE).

Laurea’s strategic choice is to integrate its three tasks: education, R&D and regional development. Laurea Living Labs Network serves the integration of the three tasks in the open and optimal way. The Ministry of Education and Culture assessed the openness of operational cultures of Finnish research organisations including Laurea and its Living Labs. Laurea received highest ranking level indicating that an open operational  culture is publicly encouraged throughout the organisational level and openness has been defined as a core value in the organisation’s strategy and policies.

Laurea Living labs follows multidisciplinary approach because of the complexity of problems they aim to tackle. Stakeholders covering research institutions, companies, public agencies, NGOs, citizens, and users usually have complementary interests and actor roles. Therefore, Laurea has strengthened its role as an intermediary at the regional, national and international levels by developing networks and culture of innovation, and sharing platforms, methodologies and evidence-based knowledge.

The development work in our key research areas is based on the iterative service design and design thinking processes utilizing different forms of knowledge to generate even radical innovations. Parallel development of our Master’s Degree Programme in Service Innovation and Design keeps us at the forefront of recent developments in the field.

Dr. Teemu Santonen received his D.Sc. (Econ.) degree in Information Systems Science from Aalto University in Finland in 2005. He is also authorized subject teacher and has over 25 years of experience in the field of innovation and is currently acting as a knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) principal lecturer at the Laurea. He is managing co-creation and business development activities for various EU-funded projects and as of today he has publish over 60 scientific publications. Prior his academic career he was working over a decade as a consult and a development manager in leading Finnish financial, media and ICT sector organizations.  Santonen has been a member of the International Society of Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM) Scientific Panel over 10 years, and is former board member of Finnish Strategic Management Society.

Dr. Tuija Hirvikoski is currently a director at Laurea responsible for the University’s strategic stakeholder management. She has received a PhD in Industrial Management (Innovation and Innovation Ecosystems), MSc in Education and MSc in Administration. She has held managerial positions at various Finnish higher education institutions and governmental institutions focusing on sustainable regional and societal development. Hirvikoski’s specific area of expertise is related to multi-stakeholder, user-centred innovation design and ecosystem development (Living Labs). Hirvikoski was the President of The European Network of Living Labs between 2015-2018 and has served as a council member in various organisations.

M.Sc. Mikko Julin is Senior lecturer at Laurea. He has educational background in physiotherapy (MSc) and biomechanics. Currently works for the Research and Development unit at Laurea and has also worked as a senior physiotherapy lecturer over 15 years. His main interests includes physical activity/inactivity and physical loading of the working environment. He has been promoting elderly people´s physical activity and wellbeing and has a long history of co-operation with the cities in the Greater Helsinki Region. Julin has been coordinator and project manager for various EU-funded projects.

Laurea Living Lab is tightly integrated with our education, R&D and regional development activities. Therefore, Laurea staff in all our core areas are available for living lab activities including e.g. 59 experts having Ph.D degree.

Areas of work: Health & Wellbeing, Social Innovation, Environment, Culture and creativity

Subsections:

• Sustainable and versatile social and health care: (1) promotion of health, well-being, functional capacity and inclusion, (2) New skills in the social and health sector, (3) Utilization of new technologies in the social and health sector, (4) Utilization of creative methods and other co-development and service design in service development work and (5) Sustainable development in the furtherance of health and well-being.
• Service Business and Circular Economy: (1) utilizes and develops new service design methods, techniques and tools to improve, innovate, and visualise the service offering, processes, and organization, (2) develops sustainable business models to promote scalable solutions, (3) co-creates and validates solutions with actual end-users in real environments, (4) helps to innovate (create new) or improve (existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for customers and efficient as well as effective for the organization.

→Previous projects:

• Product Validation in Health (ProVaHealth): ProVaHealth was an interreg-project applied to facilitate access to health infrastructures for startups and SMEs. It promoted commercialization based on excellent client validation opportunities, hands-on feedback and input for product development.
• Robots and the future of welfare services (ROSE): The project adopted a multidisciplinary and holistic approach to study how advances in robot and perception technologies allow product and service innovation and renewal of welfare services, when such services are developed jointly with users and other stakeholders based on Living lab approach.

→Running/Ongoing projects:

• Smart and Healthy Ageing through People Engaging in Supportive Systems (SHAPES): The SHAPES intends to build, pilot and deploy a large-scale, EU-standardised open platform. The integration of a broad range of technological, organisational, clinical, educational and societal solutions seeks to facilitate long-term healthy and active ageing and the maintenance of a high-quality standard of life.
• Wellbeing to Health Care: Project aims to ensure the well-being of health professionals and support the attractiveness of health care sector during and after Covid-19. Operative model to offer psychological support via online services is co-created and piloted as well as seeking alternative ways of working and policies to the healthcare sector in order to support resilience and the attractiveness of work which together helps to ensure the availability of health care labour force also in the future.

Laurea Living Labs offer access to the following equipment:

• Service robot (Pepper), Logistic robot (Omron)
• Co-creation facilities for physical, hybrid and virtual environments
• Various audio visual content production tools HMT-1 wearable, 360-video camera, drone

Laurea Living Lab offers possibilities for co-creation in physical, hybrid and virtual environments in Laurea, or in our partners indoor or outdoor premises.

The technology enables activities for co-creation includes e.g. conference room (up to 22 people) and for larger groups via hybrid and virtual technology. Conference room has fixed projector and sound system, the on-site hardware consists of videobar conferencing devices, movable workstations, two large HD-touch screens, wireless microphones, selfie stick (for walkthroughs etc.). The camera setting enables shooting the conference room wall-to-wall. Our Simulation Lab can also be utilized for similar purposes. Simulation equipment are mobile and they are easy to carry out and use in various changing situations.

The Multisensory Space at Laurea consists of a permanent room (25 m2) and a movable tent version. As an open co-creation and learning environment, it is easy to modify to suit the specific needs of the user. The permanent Space (room height: 327 cm) at Laurea includes the following technical aspects: a soundscape system, three data projectors under the sealing, a white side curtain (for projecting an image) and a curtain wall. We also have a large Nursing department that can provide additional tools for clinical measuring that can be used in the Multisensory Space. Also, the researchers can use their own equipment in the Space, when suitable. As an open and flexible Space, Multisensory Space can additionally be used for many different purposes.

Laurea has also various audio visual content production tools for photo, video, live streaming production and presentation purposes including 1^st person videos (HMT-1 wearable), 360-video, drones, mobile hybrid collaboration packages (conference microphone, web camera, stands).

Online co-creation tools includes e.g. Miro and Padlet. Collaboration with service robots (Pepper) and logistic robots (Omron) are also possible.

→Policy Makers: Studying the impact of new service models or new collaboration models in healthcare, designing or improving policies, gathering requirements for improving health and wellbeing of citizens, co-creation of research methodologies for policy making.

→Experts in communication studies: Defining written, oral, visual and digital communication within a certain workplace. Evaluating (multi professional) healthcare team collaboration, communication and debriefing in various healthcare situations in simulated environments (especially in Simulation lab)

→Social workers/researchers: Conducting an investigation in accordance with the scientific methods and tools, studying the impact of new care models and/or care innovations on society, developing models for a caring and inclusive society

→Experts in UX research and assessment: Developing the process for user experience design (UXD, UED, or XD) supporting user behaviour through usability, usefulness, and desirability provided in the interaction with a product or service, addressing all aspects as perceived by users with a focus on the quality of the user experience. Studying and experimenting the best practices for UI/UX and evaluating user’s experience in different situations and while using different tools

→Experts in rehabilitation (physical, cognitive): Physiology, physiotherapy, occupational health research, rehabilitation and prevention. Cognitive diseases assistive technology, neuromuscular rehabilitation assistive technology

→Experts in performing arts: Creative health improvement (e.g., for cognitive decline) through music and dance (example: redesigning public spaces into healthy spaces: test and validate Smart methodologies, products and services through folk dance)

→Business developers: Studying the product-market fit, matching a solution with a societal need, learning about the user acceptance of products and services, as well as about potential products to develop, willingness to pay, business model and ideal route to market

→Pedagogues/educators: Evaluating different pedagogical approaches and their impact learning performance (especially in Simulation lab)

→Experts in ergonomics and safety: Implementation and validation of ergonomic technologies/services to support workers and system performance, promoting ergonomics in working environments, improving both health/well-being and productivity, while avoiding occupational hazards

→Citizen Scientists / users as co-researchers: User empowerment, training, design, analysis and implementation of strategies and methodologies for user engagement and for raising awareness and generating citizen participation

→Innovation and design management researchers: Ecosystem and innovation management research, social network analysis. Evaluating how health and wellbeing ecosystem operates between different actors at local, regional, national and international level, including also scaling and commercialization

→Experts in organizational studies: Co-creation, experimentation, organizational research, experts by experience / pier support included. Evaluation how multistakeholder collaboration and co-creation is done and how effective it is. Evaluates experimentations and experimentation culture. How users are involved into these processes