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The scarcity of qualitative water is increasingly regarded as a timely issue of major importance, especially considering emerging environmental challenges affecting complex water systems in a local context. Thus, proactive sustainable solutions for water quality monitoring such as Internet of Things (IoT) technology are gaining prominence for innovation through data-driven decision making. In the region of Flanders, responsibilities of water policy and management are scattered across authorities and organizations with often conflicting priorities, not considering the natural borders of the waterways. For the first time, the key stakeholders combined efforts during the four-year research project "Internet of Water Flanders". The aim of the innovation project was to facilitate a more dynamic and efficient water management and pave the way towards a more robust water system. Living Labs (LL) have been used as an approach to facilitate durable solutions for a range of water management challenges such as drought, water pollution and flooding. This paper presents an in-depth case study of the project examining the value of the LL approach, where we have put forward a post-hoc impact assessment of the intended results of the project compared to the actual outcomes. Main findings are that a LL approach is suitable for an innovation project in a complex environment, with some barriers to be overcome in terms of feasibility and viability. The most added value was found on a policy level in operational recommendations for a supported governance structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current wave of AI innovation, the European Commission has defined Testing and Experimentation Facilities to be established to facilitate AI innovation in the context of new legislation such as the AI act. Within this paper, we investigate the CitCom.ai TEF in an attempt to link these TEFs to longer existing concepts such as testbeds, Living Labs and Regulatory Sandboxes. Our analysis reveals 7 service categories that can be linked to these three innovation concepts. In the 26 analysed experiments, there was a clear dominance of services linked to the concept of AI testbeds. In second place came three service categories that can be attributed to Living Labs. Remarkably, the service category linked to AI regulatory sandboxes appeared to be the least popular. This reflects the 'in development' status of this concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An Open Urban Digital Twin has the ambition to both forecast and reflect the multifaceted state and environment of the city via a digital counterpart of the actual city. Although research on Digital Twins has grown exponentially over the recent years, no thorough impact assessment of the technology in relation to the actual needs of city officials as end-users of the application has been done yet. This paper wants to fill this gap by a single case study of an actual Digital Twin use case development and implementation of the city of Bruges. We discovered the highest perceived value of the application is the strategic cross-domain data-driven decision making and the possibility to forecast scenarios with simulations. We also found that our applied innovation management approach was well suited for scoping and developing the Digital Twin use case, nevertheless some issues were raised regarding the viability of the solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, open innovation (OI) literature has extended its scope beyond strictly economical contexts to the context of societal value creation. This has given rise to the notion of (local) distributed knowledge as a driver for sustainable innovation and has highlighted the importance of multi-stakeholder collaborations in new product development (NPD) processes to develop new ICT systems for complex urban issues. Here, the project format of urban living labs shows a lot of potential to support urban sustainability transition. However, a lot of fuzziness still exists around ULLs in terms of actual value creation. By applying a systematic literature review, this paper aims at shed light on how ULLs create value for urban sustainability transition and how this value creation is being measured. The preliminary insights provide a framework for structuring potential impact of ULLs, and gives insight in how this value creation is measured in current literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although we seem to be living in an era where founding a start-up has never been easier, studies point out to high mortality rates of these organizations. This 'start-up hype' has also induced a lot of practitioner-based innovation management approaches that lack empirical studies and validation. Moreover, a lot of these approaches have rather similar angles, but use different wordings. Therefore, in this paper we look into two of these 'hyped' approaches: the Lean Start-up methodology and Living Labs. We review the academic studies on these topics and explore a sample of 86 entrepreneurial projects based on project characteristics and outcomes. As a main finding, Living Labs are powerful instruments to implement the principles of the Lean Start-up, as the real-life testing and multi-disciplinary approach seem to generate the most actionable outcomes. However, Living Labs also require the flexibility of a start-up themselves to actually deliver this promise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context-awareness is becoming an essential functionality of mobile applications. However, it remains challenging to capture the contextual experience in innovation research, since early-stage technologies have not reached maturity to be implemented in a real-life context. Moreover, users have difficulty in evaluating implicit interactions with context-aware interfaces since imagination of users is limited. Assuming that context impacts user experience, virtual reality (VR) provides an untapped potential for the domain of innovation research. The aim of this study (in progress) is to investigate the potential of user tests in virtual reality (here virtual retail store) for human-computer interaction to better match the needs of users and designers. Initially, the mock-up has been implemented in a retail store with its context-awareness being simulated using the Wizard of Oz methodology (N = 18). This approach is found to be time-consuming and not sufficient for evaluating radical context-aware innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New product development processes are subject to uncertainties. These uncertainties can and should be managed to prevent innovations from failing. Uncertainties or knowledge deficits are addressed by deploying the right approaches, or learning activities to stimulate relevant inflows of knowledge. A typology of user-oriented knowledge types is key to overcome the reluctance of organizations towards multi-actor involvement and useroriented learning activities. Here, we present a user-oriented knowledge typology departing from the end-user, embedded in a two-states framework (current state opposing future state). We discuss three iterations of the framework, including an expert review and real-world application as part of a workshop with intermediary organizations. When implemented, the framework enabled participants to identify and select learning activities enriching their innovation project. We want to underline our vision to transcend the gut-feeling and experience-driven allocation of learning activities, but instead strive towards optimal activity-selection based on the knowledge deficit at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation intermediaries are confronted with different entrepreneurial types. Academic attention on the interactions between entrepreneurs and innovation intermediaries is limited. Four entrepreneurial types are discussed throughout this paper. These are based on the source of the entrepreneurial idea (Shah & Tripsas, 2007) and the (prime) motivation for entrepreneurial activities (Block, Sandner & Spiegel, 2015): enduser entrepreneurs, professional-user entrepreneurs, classic (opportunity-driven) entrepreneurs and forced entrepreneurs. Further, this paper proposes a conceptual entrepreneur-intermediary interaction process model, facilitating knowledge transfer, with 5 stages: alignment, learning activities, interpretation, sense-making and implementation. The process model is explored by means of a multi-dimensional case study of 8 projects with distinct entrepreneurial types. Evidence is sourced from the context of a Living-Lab-as-a-Service organization. The paper contributes to the understanding of entrepreneur-intermediary interactions in general, and interactions through Living-Labs-as-a-Service in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]