Since the 1990s in the United States, and then since 2000 in Europe, a new form of innovation device has emerged, the living lab, an ecosystem in which end users (customers, users, patients, etc.) and other stakeholders are involved over a long period in the development of an innovation, in a real environment, using an iterative research approach combining different methods (Schuurman et al., 2012). Initially very much focused on technological innovation, then on topics such as health and smart cities, living labs are increasingly identified in relation to social innovation (Edwards-Schachter et al., 2012, Fasshauer and Zadra-Veil, 2020). Indeed, they encompass societal and technological dimensions in a business-citizen-government-academia partnership. Living labs refer to both open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003) and user-centered innovation (von Hippel, 2006). In this sense, they differ from other collaborative spaces that are not specifically dedicated to innovation, such as coworking spaces; or that do not always put the user at the heart of the process, such as fab labs, maker and hacker spaces, or the innovation labs that are developing in the administration as well as in companies. Nevertheless, the boundaries between these different spaces are sometimes porous and they all share the characteristic of being organizations that encourage value co-creation among different actors’ categories.
In their seminal article, Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) describe value co-creation as a joint initiative through which suppliers and recipients create value together…