Collaborative Decision-Making Processes for Local Innovation: The CoULL Methodology in Living Labs Approach

The concept of the Living Lab is closely connected to the priorities of the Europe 2020 strategy and of the Digital Agenda for Europe and is the subject of numerous user-centric open innovation programs and European projects supported by the European ENoLL Network. The chapter presents a new methodology, called Collaborative Urban Living Lab (CoULL), to support the Collaborative Decision-Making Processes to activate local innovation processes at the neighbourhood, city or landscape scale. Starting from the Quintuple Helix framework and the literature review on the Living Lab concept, its extension to the city and territorial context, and the related people-centred approaches have been discussed. The potentials to using them for putting open innovation into practice and developing innovative solutions for the cities have been shown. Nowadays, the built environments need to accelerate the transition to sustainable, climate-neutral, inclusive, resilient, healthy and smart prosperous. In the last few years, the Living Lab approaches have been promoted and used by local and international research and innovation agencies in collaboration with enterprises, NGOs and local governments to find solutions to the new issues. However, the Living Lab methodologies to guide the urban scale’s co-development solutions are few and need more accurate research and experimentations. In that direction, the CoULL methodology, tested in four different research projects (including the REPAiR project), has defined a suitable process for supporting the co-design, co-production and co-decision cycles of urban innovative and sustainable solutions.