Co-creation and Living Labs: a user-centric perspective

Nowadays involvement and engagement of people in everyday activities is even more spread. The integration of different competencies and experiences is conceived as an enrichment in every kind of activity thanks to the value achieved by the individual and social resources. Fruitful interactions among actors, is known as co-creation because of the necessary involvement of different actors, with their resources and skills to achieve value and it is framed in the service logic literature. This kind of approach was originally applied to the companies' management and governance; more recently, involvement of people is considered as a tool to improve city's services. Interactions of multiple and different actors (as citizens, local institutions and organizations) towards mutual and common interests could be at best represented by LLs process. Hence, the aim of the research is to compare the main features of the literature on co-creation with the LLs approach through a content analysis conducted by NVivo on official documents released by each LL and by Enoll, the European Network of Living Labs. The pivotal role assigned to the actors (supported by ICTs) in widespread theories on urban smartization processes, such as in LLs process theories, brought the authors to select only LLs that have as main focus urban context management and smartization process. The results led authors to observe a connection between the cocreation domain and the LLs process as the most relevant features emerging in both cases.