OpenLivingLab Days (OLLD) is the annual gathering of the global Living Lab community. A space for public officials, companies, entrepreneurs, academics, living lab representatives, and innovators to connect and work together: to create new products and services, to set the basis for debate and exploration of theories, and to discuss and process policy recommendations within the practical elements of open and user-driven innovation. Through interactive panel discussions, hands-on workshops with leading experts and site visits to our local partners, OLLD offers an exclusive networking and knowledge sharing experience.

Join Living Labs, companies, public officials, policy makers, researchers, non-profits and entrepreneurs to:

  • Explore co-creation methodologies, tools and best practices
  • Meet new partners for consortium building and set-up transnational experimentation grounds
  • Transform markets by engaging citizens in co-creating products and services
  • Find potential experimentation & test environments

THEME OF THE EVENT: "CO-CREATING INNOVATION: SCALING-UP FROM LOCAL TO GLOBAL"

Why Co-creation?

  • Key component of User-driven Innovation  
  • Turning into buzzword, fear of losing quality
  • Horizon Europe

Why “from local to global”?

  • Up-scaling and transferring innovation
  • Connecting innovation pockets
  • SME Internationalisation: how does innovation jump between borders?

MEET THE ORGANISERS

European Network of Living Labs

The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) is the international federation of benchmarked Living Labs in Europe and worldwide. Founded in November 2006 under the auspices of the Finnish European Presidency, the network has grown in ‘waves’ up to this day.

The European approach to Living Labs was created in the Unit “Collaborative working environments” of the DG INFSO (now DG CONNECT) in close collaboration with an industrial advisory group on Open Innovation (Open Innovation Strategy and Policy group – OISPG) which was founded by Bror Salmelin. The original concept was updated to open innovation environments attracting inwards investment, both intellectual and financial one.

ENoLL counts today over 150+ active Living Labs members worldwide (440+ historically recognised over 12 years), including active members in 20 of the 28 EU Member States, 2 of the candidates and it is present in 5 continents in addition to Europe. Directly, as well as through its active members, ENoLL provides co-creation, user engagement, test and experimentation facilities targeting innovation in many different domains such as energy, media, mobility, healthcare, agrifood, etc. As such, ENoLL is well placed to act as a platform for best practice exchange, learning and support, and Living Lab international project development.

Thessaloniki Active and Healthy Ageing Living Lab

Thess-AHALL, operational since 2014, and a unique setting in the city of Thessaloniki, Central Macedonia region (Northern Greece). The lab fosters initiatives encouraging regional development and healthcare systems sustainability by the provision of novel technologies and innovation. The lab is actively engaged with the end-users and relevant community stakeholders, actively pursuing co-creation and co-design of technological solutions to improve health and social conditions and facilitate independent living. The main goal is to facilitate the ultimate aim of speeding up innovation, collaboration, development and testing of more accurate services, which is achieved by the early involvement of users as co-creators.

The lab’s main strengths lie with the operation in actual community settings and residences following a paradigm of actual in-the-wild collection and processing of data, offerring ecological validity schemes, a strategic geographical location and a wide, trans-national network with strong collaboration capacity with the Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA) ecosystem in Greece and the Balkan region and along experience in user driven innovation and evidence-based research in the AHA domain. The underlying Big Data infrastructure with the existence of big and heterogeneous volumes of data stemming from the large scale pilots with seniors puts ThessAHALL in a pivotal  position. Finally, Thess-AHALL aims to develop a business plan for self-sustainability, in line with the ENoLL’s strategy, facilitating the people demand with the active involvement of SMEs within pilots.

The Thess-AHALL is governed by the Laboratory of Medical Physics, School of Medicine, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki which has essentially spinned-off two commercial entities: the self-funded (University based) initiative LLM Care and Neuroanadrasi which was founded by members of the Lab based on exploiting the neuroscientific capacity of the Lab. Apart from the involvment of exernal SMEs and research groups, Thess-AHALL has also built strong collaborations with nursing homes, daily care centres, municipalities, Regional Health Authorities of Attica and Central Macedonia, Elderly care centres of the Greek Federation of Alzheimer’s Associations (some 20 units, spread throughout Greece).