SKETCH INDUSTRY PROMOTION FRAMEWORK FOR SMART …€¦ · SKETCH INDUSTRY PROMOTION FRAMEWORK FOR SMART LIVING SERVICES BY LEVERAGING LIVI NG LAB HARMONIZATION CUBE . Yu-Tso Chen

International Journal of Electronic Business Management, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 149-162 (2012) 149

SKETCH INDUSTRY PROMOTION FRAMEWORK FOR SMART LIVING SERVICES BY LEVERAGING LIVING LAB

HARMONIZATION CUBE

Yu-Tso Chen Department of Information Management

National United University Miaoli (36003), Taiwan

ABSTRACT

In recent years, forward-thinking governments are attaching great importance to smart living services to enhance quality of life for people and to create new business opportunities for economic growth. An emerging systematic approach Living Lab commonly explained as a human-centric research and development methodology is getting widely applied to service engineering and business innovations. Several contextual Living Lab principle models for example ENoLL Living Lab Harmonization Cube (ENoLL-HC) have been introduced, however how such Living Lab based frameworks can benefit promoting service industry is merely discussed. This paper presents a novel Smart Living Industry Promotion (SLIP) framework capable of improving industrial benefits of from designing smart living trail systems to commercializing smart living services. An operation instance of SLIP with leveraging ENoLL-HC and a proposed 6-stage Living Lab process on the strength of a ViTeF business innovation approach is also demonstrated. By means of a P4P operation, the SLIP framework provides a systematic approach which is useful for not only enhancing the industrial performance of smart living services but advancing Living Lab researches. Keywords: Living Lab, Harmonization Cube, Business Innovation, Smart Living, Industry Promotion

1. INTRODUCTION 1

In recent years, forward-thinking governments are attaching great importance to smart living services. In Europe, Denmark is promoting Smart Healthcare services in Copenhagen; Sweden is operating an Intelligent Transportation system in Stockholm; Germany is deploying RFID-based Intelligent Logistics applications in its core cities; Russia is performing a Ubiquitous Info Access project emphasizing Cloud Computing technology in Moscow. In USA, smart living services such as Renewable Energy and Green Energy Usage, Total Public Safety, Ubiquitous Education, Smart Telework, and etc are increasingly implemented in cities like Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and several regions in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile in Asia, Japan is planning various smart living services in Tokyo, Kurashiki, Uruma, and Yokosuka; South Korea is developing different intelligent applications in Seoul and Songdo International Business District. In Taiwan, the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA)

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

has launched a Smart Living Technology Application Project, also called i236 Project [28] since 2009, to seek ideal smart living services in specific cities/regions including Taichung, Pu-Li, Yi-Lan, and Da-Ai Reconstruction Village in Kaohsiung County.

A smart living service leveraging Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is able to enhance quality of life for people. According to a 2009 to 2010 United Nations World Urbanization Prospects study [31], world population in urban is more than that in non-urban since 2010 and will reach up to 60% in 2050; the population living in urban areas is projected to gain 2.9 billion, passing from 3.4 billion in 2009 to 6.3 billion in 2050. As urban areas grow in population, they expand outward as well as upward, thus overwhelming the natural environment and human-centered urban ecosystems. This trend, rapid urbanization, indicates the following emerging living challenges [8]: Housing: Overcrowded tenements were

un-healthy places to live. Sanitation: Too much garbage to be collected, the

more garbage the more air and water pollution. Transportation: Cities struggled to provide

adequate transit systems.

150 International Journal of Electronic Business Management, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2012)

Healthcare: Without safe drinking water due to inadequate water-cleaning system, so that infectious diseases were common.

Public Safety: As populations increased thieves flourished. In addition, limited water and the effect of urban heat island led to many major urban fires.

Washburn and Sindhu [35] expounded their thoughts of Smart City initiatives for CIOs in view of a concept that, “cities are becoming smarter, as governments, businesses, and communities increasingly rely on Smart Technology to overcome the challenges from rapid urbanization.” They further defined Smart Technology as a new generation of integrated hardware, software, and network technologies that provide ICT systems with real-time awareness of the real world and advanced analytics to help people make more intelligent decisions about alternatives and actions. In brief, smart services for living is to apply ICT technology to upgrade and innovate existing services/systems to overcome emerging living challenges, as well as to fulfill overall quality of life, thus finally sustain city ecosystems.

A smart living service is not only able to enhance quality of life for people but also to create new opportunities for economic growth. It is generally acknowledged that ICT industry is a rapidly growing part of global economy. ICT industry is considered to boost innovation and productivity of other industries, so that an economy with a strong ICT industry could be a more competitive one than others. Hence, as ICT is adopted to enhance living services to become smarter, the accompanied new products and novel business models may consequently create new opportunities of business innovation for future economic growth.

Taiwan government is now making efforts in sketching future smart city blueprints for people, as well as incubating smart living service industry to be a new economic growth engine. Over the past decades, the success of cultivating semiconductor industry brought Taiwan’s economic growth up. Semiconductor industry plays a key role of raising the value chain of ICT products; in consequent, Taiwan reaped considerable profits from designing and/or manufacturing ICT devices such as laptop, communications devices, cellular phone, and etc. Nevertheless as Taiwan’s MOEA stated, “Taiwan’s future exports shall not only cover hardware but also product usage; i.e., service industry.” Nowadays, Taiwan’s industry development is practically facing a significant problem: too much focus on mass manufacturing industries, therefore hard to sustain strong national economic development while service industry is becoming a global economic stream.

In order to ease this problem, Taiwan government has announced a national grant program

named Intelligent Taiwan (i-Taiwan) since 2008. The i-Taiwan, based on the achievements of ICT infrastructure build-out, capacity building, and the development of high-tech services from a series of completed national initiative projects including e-Taiwan and m-Taiwan. The e-Taiwan has helped Taiwan to realize the ideal of a high-tech service island and to become one of the best e-country in Asia; the m-Taiwan has assisted Taiwan to build a nation-wide wireless broadband network to provide extensive mobile services for the public, and further to aim at introducing smart technologies to enhance people’s quality of life. Meanwhile, an i236 Project proposed as a pilot program of i-Taiwan engineering is in charge of seeking smart living services on 2 types of living zone, smart city/town and intelligent park, with using 3 primary ICT technologies including Wireless Broadband Networks, Digital TV Networks, and Wireless Sensor Networks, so that the planned intelligent systems will improve citizens’ quality of life through 6 application directions: (1) safety and calamity prevention, (2) medication and healthcare, (3) sustainable energy savings, (4) smart and ease-of-use, (5) comfort and convenience, and (6) agriculture and leisure. The main goals of i236 Project are to: (1) foster new industries through using living zones as domestic markets with new business opportunities; (2) level-up traditional industries with ICT technology and new business opportunities; and (3) sketch a smart living blueprint for Intelligent Taiwan deployment. The i236 Project is perceived as a key role in the service industry development of Taiwan via activating a user-centric, service-oriented innovation approach, the Living Lab.

At present, the i236 Promotion Office (PO) has promulgated Call for Proposal specifications to request for 20 or more potential smart living systems to be accomplished by industrial companies or corporate bodies in appropriate living zones in Taiwan by 2012. Unfortunately, Living Lab is an unfamiliar approach for Taiwan government; i.e., the i236 Project is the first and up to now the only national initiative program which intends to adopt Living Lab concept. That is to say, the i236 PO is up against four common matters towards service industry promotion due to insufficient experiences on Living Lab: (1) How to select conceivable smart living proposals beneficial to arrange potential industry? (2) What principles or key performance indicators (KPIs) are helpful to perform system design, analysis, and further effectively estimate the partial or final outcomes of the promised Living Labs systems? (3) How to define indices to be monitored for industrial promotion? (4) How to drive service/business innovations more user-driven rather than technology-driven? For solving these problems, a novel Living Lab based Smart Living Industry Promotion (SLIP) framework capable of promoting

Y. T. Chen: Sketch Industry Promotion Framework for Smart Living Services 151

industrial profits of from designing smart living systems to commercializing smart living services is sketched and introduced in this paper.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. First, the concept of Living Lab, the introduction of a leading community of Living Lab called European Network of Living Lab (ENoLL) [5] and an ENoLL Living Lab Harmonization Cube (ENoLL-HC) consisting of 54 innovation principles which is indispensable to this study are reviewed. Second, three perspectives of promoting a Living Lab system including Principle, Process, and Signpost are introduced in section 3. Next, the Section 4 represents the SLIP framework capable of enhancing the capabilities of service industry promotion. It further illustrates a P4P operation of SLIP with using the ENoLL-HC and a Living Lab process generated by an existed Vision Integrated Technology Foresight (ViTeF) business innovation methodology, and thus demonstrates an Actions Allocation Table (AAT) as an outcome of SLIP. Moreover, the SLIP pros and cons for service industry promotion are discussed in section 5. Finally, the last section concludes this paper with future works.

2. LIVING LAB METHODOLOGY

With the rapid growth of system-thinking and

strategic management science, systematic methodologies such as TRIZ, System Dynamics, Concurrent Engineering, Living Lab, and the like have been widely applied by governments and companies to innovate their administrative initiatives and business models. In which Living Lab is a novel innovation approach stressing the support of open innovation activities for business modeling and virtual enterprising. The increasing number of people and organizations behind this approach are fully convinced that the proposed way to empower users in open cross-border collaboration will become a very strong element in a new innovation system. In a word, the Living Lab methodology can engage and empower large groups of citizens in open real-world experimentally driven innovation processes; therefore it is highly respected to broaden business innovations especially on ICT-based industries like smart living services.

The concept of Living Lab can be interpreted and used as a human-centric research and development approach whereby innovations on ICT are co-created, tested, and evaluated in open, collaborative, multi-contextual, and real-world settings [5, 24]. In addition, Living Lab methodology not only focuses on involving users in system’s development process, it also strives to facilitate the interactions among other relevant stakeholders,

including academia and research organizations, SMEs, business industries, civic sectors, ICT professionals, and public partners.

Today, Europe is the most advanced area of studying, applying and promoting Living Labs. Europe has accepted the Living Lab concept with open arms as the way to deal with user-driven open innovations. Several initiatives joined forces into a European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) [5]. ENoLL envisions applying this emerging methodology for co-creative research and innovation, including new means of open source, open architecture developments, IPR, management of research and innovation as well as novel forms to direct user involvement in the innovation process. ENoLL has become a global leading community of Living Lab research and applications.

Living Lab is an engineering approach not just a testbed. Although in the past few years, studies on applying Living Lab ideas to construct smart living testbeds have received considerable interest in Taiwan’s academic and research circles; i.e., associated organizations including ITRI [10], III [11], NTU INSIGHT Center [20], NCTU Eco-City [19], and NCKU TOUCH Center [18], have presented manifold outcomes of their smart living trials, but the core perspectives of Living Lab like user co-creation and user experience feedback were not adequately implemented. Nowadays, ENoLL provides more pragmatic theory, best practices with fully- experienced, large-scale Living Lab implementations as valuable reference for Living Lab engineering. 2.1 ENoLL Living Lab Roadmap

ENoLL has proposed a roadmap for Living Lab developments. In essence, Living Lab is a new and complex engineering science; it’s not just a kind of testbed. The main philosophy of Living Lab is to turn users from being traditionally considered as observed subjects for testing modules against requirements into value creation in contributing to the co-creation and exploration of emerging ideas, breakthrough scenarios, innovative concepts and related artifacts. Hence, Living Lab rather constitutes an experiential environment which could be compared to the concept of Experiential Learning, where users are immerged in a creative social space for designing and experiencing their own future. Living Lab could also be used by policy makers and users/citizens for designing, exploring, experiencing and refining practical policies and regulations in real-life scenarios for evaluating their potential impacts before their implementations. That is, a Living Lab system is a multidisciplinary and ecosystem-alike environment. For handling such complexity, to have a common-consensus guideline for inter-discussions among the Living Lab researchers, stakeholders, and


the users is imperative. As a result, ENoLL published a Living Lab Roadmap [4] in 2010.

A primary goal of ENoLL is to specify shared definition, planning, coordination, and marketing tools, to be used and jointly maintained by people and organizations engaged in building innovative systems for sustainable European competitiveness. The ENoLL Living Lab Roadmap is deservedly seen as a guidebook about introducing how to build, grow and mature Living Labs systems and further to reinforce Europe’s capability to generate competitive products, services, content and societal infrastructure. Through recognizing the importance of human free spirit, inclusion, and environmental friendliness for sustainability, the ENoLL Living Lab Roadmap recommends principles for Living Lab development and maturity in terms of proposed R&D areas, policy priorities and federation rules. All these Living Lab principles introduced in this roadmap are assembled as a 6-views structure, an ENoLL Living Lab Harmonization Cube. 2.2 ENoLL Living Lab Harmonization Cube

ENoLL Living Lab Harmonization Cube (ENoLL-HC) is a shared reference towards concepts, methods, and tools for designing a Living Lab. In 2007, Mulder et al. [16, 17] developed an interoperability cube for harmonizing Living Lab implementations. This interoperability cube (shown as Figure 1) built on the assumption that the focus on synergies and those elements that Living Labs want to exchange with each other forms an appropriate basis for the harmonization of methods and tools. The ENoLL-HC identifies these exchange possibilities and explicitly, and defines interoperability elements

composed by 6 views: User Involvement, Service Creation, Infrastructure, Governance, Innovation Outcomes, and Method & Tools. Each view is then introduced with considering Setup, Sustainability, Scalability perspectives with crossing Organizational, Contextual, and Technological issues. This cube has great potential to understand the essentials of a Living Lab system while designing. It also provides parties a method to identify requirements to be further achieved of their Living Labs systems.

The paradigm of using ENoLL-HC is that it enables the evaluation possibilities of a Living Lab and is helpful to uncover the added value of the Living Lab as an open innovation instrument. As a result, the ENoLL-HC can be adopted as a discussion facilitator both within one Living Lab and between other Living Labs. The ENoLL-HC is the platform of discussing the methods, tools, experiences, and best practices to be mapped into the associated interoperability elements (also called principles, as the 6x3x3 structure expanded items in Figure 1). Some Illustrative principles are as follows: (1) Organizational issue on Setup for Service Creation is “organization, training”; (2) Contextual issue on Setup for Service Creation is “idea generation, business support services”; (3) Technological issue on Setup for Service Creation is “communication services”. In brief, an outstanding role for ENoLL’s promoting its ENoLL-HC is to encourage Living Labs to describe their best practices in terms of the interoperability elements; hence it not only helps in dealing with Living Lab principles, but also offers an easy interface to access the repository of Living Lab methods and tools.

Figure 1: Fifty-four principles of ENoLL Living Lab Harmonization Cube (Source: CoreLabs [4])

2.3 Use of the ENoLL-HC

ENoLL-HC is conducive to represent a Living Lab and to demonstrate the outcomes of a Living Lab through structuring Living Lab activities as well as the taxonomy and repository of methods and tools

which are utilized in various Living Labs systems. In general, when dissecting a Living Lab, the invited experts and stakeholder delegation were asked to interpret what essentials need to be communicated? An experience form of ENoLL-HC contains nine


elements for per view is frequently used to note their experiences, best practices, things they were proud of, questions they still have or challenges to be addressed.

The ENoLL-HC not only provides a common ground for discussion, it also contributes an appropriate style of representing a Living Lab. In these years, each ENoLL Living Lab representative was asked to promote his Living Lab instance by six different photographs, each reflecting one side of the cube model and accompanied with a short

explanation (as Figure 2 demonstrated, it explains how a representative of the i-City Living Lab of Hasselt (Belgium) completed this creative exercise). For further details, more photos, pictures or images reflecting the Living Lab’s best practices, things they were proud of, etc are combined as a six-view photo cube to demonstrate Living Labs values and best practices. The photo cubes were used to enhance interactivity and creativity during experience sharing, and were also published on the ENoLL blog.

Figure 2: Photo Cube example illustrating the value of i-City Living Lab (Source: Mulder et al. [17])

3. ANALYSIS OF PLANNING

LIVING LABS SYSTEMS

This section presents how to adopt three components, Principle, Process, and Signpost to arrange an ideal Living Labs system. Although the ENoLL-HC is a valuable method practical to describe a Living Lab as well as to demonstrate a Living Lab system, it provides few capabilities of procedure handling and project management that are critical functionalities of system realizations. Essentially, the ENoLL-HC is an assembled structure composed of 54 Living Lab interoperability principles; however the relationships between these principles are unapparent. That is to say, it’s not reasonable to setup an actionable and traceable process of executing a Living Lab system only leveraging the ENoLL-HC method.

As mentioned in section 2, Living Lab is a series of engineering steps of inviting associated users and stakeholders to join appropriate activities in proper time. Therefore as conceiving the requirements of planning a Living Lab, the concept of Engineering Analysis should be expressly quoted. Engineering Analysis involves the applications of scientific analytic principles and processing

workflows to reveal the properties and the state of the aimed system. Accordingly, Principle and Process are both fundamentals of constructing an engineering system. In practice, a Living Lab system is a reality of a specific pilot application in real life, even it focuses on commercialized services for near future. Hence, engineering with quality management is indispensable to a Living Lab implementation.

ISO 9000 standard defines the quality management engineering containing the following rules: a set of procedures that cover all key processes in

the business; monitoring processes to ensure they are effective; keeping adequate records; checking output for defects, with appropriate and

corrective action where necessary; regularly reviewing individual processes and the

quality system itself for effectiveness; and facilitating continual improvement

These rules imply that not only processes and actions should be taken care in engineering, the review and improvement activities are also critical. Therefore, the following three essentials of constructing systematic Living Lab operations are pointed out with obeying the ISO 9000 rules:


1. Principle: A principle means a set of Living Lab elements which represent necessary working items on designing a Living Lab system.

2. Process: A process is an aggregation of interdependent stages transforming and manipulating elements into products. A key point to be emphasized here is, applicable actions will be generated as soon as the working items are prioritized, confirmed, and classified into a stage.

3. Signpost. A signpost defined here is a strategic checking item for progress review, control, and optimization. A signpost is a composition of watched conditions following with one or more associated actions.

3.1 Related Works towards Principle Models

Nowadays, plenty of Living Lab principle models are introduced and discussed in academic and industrial circles. Except the ENoLL-HC, Gulliksen, et al. [7] also proposed a series of key principles for user innovation on Living Lab. These proposed principle models cover the role users’ play in idea generation, design, development and evaluation of new methods and tools. However, they are mainly perceived as Living Lab working guideline, but insufficient to describe actionable items necessary when performing a Living Lab plan as well as monitoring a real Living Lab implementation. 3.2 Related Works towards Engineering Processes

To advance the principle elements becoming actionable items, the perspective of Process is considered. A process in engineering is commonly described as a set of interdependent tasks transforming input elements into products. The ANSI/EIA-632 serves as a well-known standard towards systems engineering process, and significantly drives the development of various service science, management, and engineering approaches. Because the Living Lab is a service engineering methodology to establish user-driven innovations, a service-oriented process plays an important role of Living Lab implementations.

The ANSI/EIA-632 engineering scheme and its predecessor, the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) approach, are both focused on meeting all requirements, primary customer needs, as well as coordinating the system development process by involving all relevant disciplines. Gould [6] presented some realistic methodologies based on PLM according to specific purposes; Concurrent Engineering (CE) is one of these revised methodologies. CE is a workflow carrying out a number of tasks in parallel instead of working sequentially through stages. CE is a well-defined systematic approach contributing to optimize engineering cycles [12, 15, 21, 22]. Bergvall-Kåreborn, et al. [1] established a CE-based

system, called FormIT, which provides a valuable process for implementing Living Labs systems.

Living Lab is about innovation, Living Lab for service industry is about business innovation. Living Labs are open innovation environments in real-life settings, in which user-driven innovation is fully integrated within the co-creation process of new services, products and societal infrastructures. Business innovation can be seen as an industrial change in a process for doing something. Numerous organizations have applied Scenario Planning methodology to business innovation for better strategic options and vision building [23, 27, 32]. The power of Scenario Planning for business was originally established by Royal Dutch/Shell, which has used scenarios since the early 1970s as part of a process for generating and evaluating its strategic options [25, 34]. Another candidate for originator of scenario thinking was Stanford University, which setup the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to offer long-term planning facilities for education, governance, and of course business innovations.

Scenario Planning is a Forward Thinking scheme with considering key trends and associated uncertainties; however some Backward Thinking approaches emphasis on visioning play a critical role of business innovations as well. In 2005, IBM researchers developed a service model called Impact of Future Technology (IoFT) [9] to provide on-demand innovation services to their Global Business Services customers. The IoFT can explore technology landscape, identify strategic actions and other disruptors or game changers that may signal new business opportunities or threats on innovation analysis.

Chen, et al. [3] presented a systematic innovation methodology, Vision Integrated Technology Foresight (ViTeF), which combines the merits of the IoFT and the SRI Scenario Planning. The ViTeF is a technology foresight and business innovation approach with a step-by-step process. ViTeF is not only an important approach for ITRI/Taiwan to build development roadmap of emerging technologies such as Mobile Surveillance System [3] and Intelligent Flexibly Display, it also has been used for MOEA/Taiwan to sketch industry innovation blueprint for Taiwan 2015 [15]. In brief, the purpose of leveraging Process to Living Lab system is to let principle elements become actionable and evaluative. Here, the ViTeF is suggested to be as an ideal process method to help designing smart living services under Living Lab implementation. 3.3 Related Works towards Strategic Signposts

Since Living Lab is a method of facilitating the interactions among users and other relevant stakeholders (in an ecosystem), it essentially focuses on bringing many intangible elements together into a


cohesive client experience. Unlike traditional manufacturing innovations, service innovations as Living Labs are inherently much more multidisciplinary and call for a graceful change of methods and procedures used for innovation management at different stages of the innovation life cycle [13]. In the past few years, studies on management of changes or uncertainties indicate different research challenges to service innovations. Innovation challenges are including: (1)How should future uncertainties be managed during the entire innovation process? (2)How could uncertainties related to service innovations be better managed? Strong, et al. [29, 30] proposed a novel theory, called Signpost, for adaptive contingency planning. A signpost is a recognizable potential event that signals a change that it is actionable. The Signpost method has been successfully field tested in several cases related to strategy-setting for enterprise; it would also contribute to service innovations, so that a Living Lab system can be better arranged as well as readily monitored and evaluated.

4. SMART LIVING INDUSTRY PROMOTION FRAMEWORK

This section sketches a novel Living Lab based

framework for smart living industry promotion on the basis of the contention mentioned in section 3.

4.1 SLIP Framework

For composing a better process, a 4-levels Living Lab processing architecture of ENoLL [4] is referred with considering the features of promoting smart living services, in particular considering characteristics of smart computing and ICT-enabled intelligence. The revised four processing units are: 1. People Unit: It originally indicates the

professional network of Living Labs experts. Especially, the end users/customers of the planned living zone are suggested to be involved.

2. Organizational Unit: According to ENoLL, organizational and contractual structures implemented and a set of common methodologies employed are defined in this unit. Furthermore, this unit is extended with containing all the stakeholders from government, academic/research communities, and industrial companies. Taking Taiwan’s i236 Project as an example, the i236 PO, MOEA/Taiwan, ITRI, III, and the companies serving their products to Living Lab users are all belong to this unit. The most important issue in this unit is to define the ecosystem and the industrial value chain of the aimed services and applications.

3. Application/Collaborative Unit: It is a common collaborative architecture able to support co-creation processes via integrating all

stakeholders. In a practical point of view, an application defined here is a product/service or a business model to be tested and evaluated in a Living Lab plan. Besides, the collaborative activities are including associated supporting technologies, policies and agreements of/among service providers.

4. Infrastructure Unit: As ENoLL’s definition, this unit specifies harmonized testbed and network infrastructure. Further, more elements are added into this unit, like ICT networks, and of course the planned living zone.

The next paragraph shows that Process and Principle are co-worked with these four processing units and produce a SLIP framework. Although ENoLL Living Lab Roadmap introduces the ENoLL-HC and the 4-levels processing architecture, it lacks of describing influences between them. In another word, it’s difficult to carry out system engineering only relying on the ideas the ENoLL’s roadmap guidebook presented. Therefore, an idea of combining the Living Lab Process and the processing units with the Living Lab Principles is proposed, so that consults a SLIP framework as drawn in Figure 3.

Figure 3: The proposed SLIP Framework

4.2 A Living Lab Process by ViTeF

A Living Lab Process is a selected working flow in support of executing a Living Lab system. A process in general is composed of various interdependent stages; for example, the FormIT methodology developed by [1] is an eleven-stage Living Lab innovation process. According to Chen’s ideas [2] of discovering key functions of smart living applications for Living Lab plans like i236 Project by considering issues-push and demand-pull, the ViTeF [3, 14] which consists of 14 function modules covering issue-push and demand-pull activities is applied to build a 6-stage Living Lab Process as depicted in Figure 4:

Stage 1, Scoping Business/Service Areas: This stage contains the activities of ViTeF’s module 1 (Scoping), and module 2 (Background). The main purpose of this stage is to define the appropriate system boundary, and then scope an ecosystem containing all the essential stakeholders and the commercial relationships among them.


Figure 4: A Living Lab Process generated by ViTeF

Stage 2, Prioritizing Key Issues/Problems: In

this stage, it inherits the features of ViTeF’s module 3 (Trends), module 4 (Force of Changes), and module 5 (Ideation). The purpose of this stage is primary to broadly collect ideas, issues in discussion, and existed problems; next to prioritize the results. Some famous Divergent tools like Ideation, Relevance Wheels, etc are suggested to be utilized in this stage.

Stage 3, Confirming Requirements/Functions: Stage 3 is consisting of the activities of ViTeF’s modules 6, 7, 8, and 9, i.e., Baseline Future, Alternative Future, Vision Scenario, and Functionality Deep Dive. The outcomes of this stage will be (1)the selected requirements according to the three-types of future scenarios, and (2)the associated functionalities including technologies and business models profitable to realize the target services with considering the scenarios. The well-known Convergent schemes like SRI Scenario Planning and QFD are recommended here.

Stage 4, Implementing Living Labs Systems: The implementation process of Living Lab system (ViTeF’s modules 10, 11, 12, and 13) is accordingly triggered as the functions of the target Living Lab are confirmed. Basically, the right-now execution actions are categorized as the part of Baseline Initiatives (the module 10 in ViTeF); else, the candidate actions keep monitored are classified into Alternative Signpost or Vision Signpost. Actions related to non-technology issues, for example the political matters, regulations, economic uncertainties should also be taken care in this Strategic Actions module. In almost situations, all the modules in this stage are frequently mutual-operated.

Stage 5, Performance Evaluation & Experiences Feedback: This stage can be perceived as an evaluation phase for Living Lab system. The

works in this stage manifest the core spirit of Living Lab, user co-creation, due to experiences feedback from users and stakeholders. The last 5 modules in ViTeF are partially operated in this stage until the expected results are accomplished. Besides, working items among from stage 3 to stage 5 are iteratively operated since these three stages are inherited from the corresponding ViTeF modules which form an evolving procedure.

Stage6, Industrial Propagation & Global Arrangement: In essence, this stage is an extension of stage 5. The purpose of this stage is to conclude the outcomes of a finished Living Lab system and then to reproduce this implementation to other similar living zones. As long as the completed Living Lab system is planned to be rebuilt in other living zones (including a global market or a specific foreign area), the Refresh and Monitoring module will thus be activated due to the considerations of differentiation between their cultures, economic ecosystems, political architectures, and etc. 4.3 P4P Operation and Its Actions Allocation Table

The main difference between ENoLL’s processing architecture and the SLIP is that the Living Lab Process is as a process engine with referring to contextual items of Living Lab Principles, so that the SLIP is made operationable. The operation of SLIP is to match each Living Lab principles into associated stages in Living Lab Process with referencing the features of relevant 4 processing units (thus call it P4P operation, as depicted in Figure 5), and thus determine actionable working items or indicators for evaluating specific actions.

Next, a SLIP practice is exercised according to the experiences from i236 PO. The i236 PO not only helped to point out necessary activities for entering a next stage from one current stage, for example


Request for Ideas, Form a Review Committee, etc (as highlighted in Figure 5), but also helped to form an Actions Allocation Table (AAT) as demonstrated in Table 1. The symbol ※ in Table 1 denotes there will

be actionable working items or indicators for evaluating specific actions to be taken care there.

Table 1: An AAT Result of operating SLIP – According to experiences from i236 PO

Views

Living Lab Process

Principles on views

Scoping Business/ Service Areas

Prioritizing Key Issues/ Problems

Confirming Requirements/

Functions

Implementing Living Lab Systems

Performance Evaluation & Experiences

Feedback

Industry Propagation &

Global Arrangements

User Involvem

ent

Se

get users motivated ※ ※ ※ which type user, effort, expectations required? ※ ※ provide tools to have users involved ※ ※ ※ ※

Su

keep users motivated ※ ※ need for unobtrusive methods ※ ※ ※ automatic data collection ※ ※

Sc

different approaches to motivate different users ※ ※ ※ knowledge on cultural and legal differences ※ ※ ※ need for low cost observation methods ※ ※

Service Creation

Se

organization ,training ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ idea generation, business support services ※ ※ ※ ※ communication services ※ ※ ※

Su

governance ※ ※ ※ idea generation, services specific to stakeholders ※ ※ ※ ※ collaboration services ※ ※ ※ ※

Sc

management ※ ※ ※ market customization ※ ※ demonstration validation prototyping ※ ※ ※

Infrastructure

Se

to deploy collaboration processes ※ ※ ※ selected infrastructure providers ※ ※ infrastructures used to deploy first defined scenarios ※ ※

Su

collaborative infrastructures ※ ※ ※ best fitting infrastructures with environment ※ ※ ※ interoperable/standardized infrastructures ※ ※

Sc

collaborative infrastructures in ENoLL

※ENoLL i236PO ※ENoLL

i236PO infrastructure to be adapted to other environments ※ most used infrastructures ※

Governance

Se

commitment & responsibilities ※ ※ ※ ※ ownership drivers/ management structure ※ ※ ※ management working practices ※

Su financing service selection ※ ※ ※ ※ funding strategy dynamics ※ ※ sharing resources & infrastructure ※ ※

Sc

business models ※ ※ ※ ※ extensions(services, partners, users) ※ ※ ※ ※ operational excellence ※ ※

Innovation Outcom

es

Se

innovation expertise, competencies ※ ※ ※ target market, value for stakeholders ※ ※ ※ ※ Innovation-supportive environments idea, patent ※ ※ ※

Su

IPR early phase innovation ※ ※ optimal degree of interaction context-sensitive ※ ※ supporting optimal interaction ※ ※

Sc

involvement of experts, stakeholders ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ extendable context, target market ※ ※ massively distributed multi-user environment ※ ※

Methods &

Tools

Se

taxonomy of methods & tools ※ ※ ※ appropriate methods for LL available ※ ※ technology support for methods & tools ※ ※ ※

Su

methods & tools are institutionalized ※ ※ Living Lab methods ※ ※ ※ technologies are implemented ※ ※ ※

Sc

methods & tools are exchanged in the ENoLL ※ENoLL

i236PO ※ENoLL

i236PO ※ENoLL

i236PO pan-European Living Lab projects-sharing best practices

※pan-Europeanglobal



new technologies/ possibilities through ENoLL ※ENoLL

i236PO ※ENoLL

i236PO ※ENoLL

i236PO ※ENoLL

i236PO


Figure 5: The P4P operation of SLIP

5. DISCUSSIONS

The objective of the proposed SLIP aims at the

solutions to the four matters towards service industry promotion noted in section 1. The reviews of the SLIP on these four matters and some other issues worthy of discussion are analyzed as follows. (1) Is SLIP helpful to select conceivable smart

living proposals beneficial to arrange potential industry? SLIP applying a good innovation process like ViTeF is possible to provide appropriate methods and tools to comprehensively process domain knowledge, experts’ idea, stakeholders’ considerations and user requirements to prioritize impact factors related to performance evaluation and industrial profits estimation for selecting potential proposals.

(2) Is SLIP helpful to find out principles or key performance indicators (KPIs) beneficial to perform system design, analysis, and further effectively estimate the partial or final outcomes of the promised Living Labs systems? SLIP not only adopts well-defined Living Lab principles for discussing and representing the designs of the target Living Lab system, but also generates the AAT containing actionable working items and performance indicators which are able to help monitoring system status as well as evaluating and analyzing system performance.

(3) Is SLIP helpful to define monitoring indices for industrial promotion? SLIP can transform massive collected date from system log records and user experience feedback via referencing the indices confirmed in AAT and possibly to make Knowledge Management with using Information technologies such as Data-Mining,

Text-Mining to create services ontology which is a key to design Turnkey Solutions for industry promotion.

(4) (4) Is SLIP helpful to drive service/business innovation more user-driven rather than technology-driven? SLIP is basically a Living Lab based innovation framework; it naturally owns the spirit of user-driven service innovation. Moreover, SLIP particularly put emphasis on its feature of linking Living Lab Process to Living Lab principles and associated processing units; therefore it really is a practical framework capable of realizing user-driven innovations.

(5) Is SLIP applicable to all kinds of service industry promotion cases? The proposed SLIP is a conceptual framework revealing the operation of Living Lab principles along with Living Lab process; it is certainly suitable for any Living Lab based services. Besides that, the ENoLL-HC and ViTeF-based Living Lab process are both applicable to all kinds of service systems because the ENoLL-HC has been the common platform for representing a Living Lab among global Living Lab parties, the ViTeF including its sub-modules, the SRI Scenario Planning and the IBM IoFT, are also broadly and frequently used in different plans over the world.

(6) What are the details of the actions in an AAT? This paper results an AAT according to the experiences from i236 PO. Unfortunately the demonstrated AAT is just a mapping table with using symbol ※ to imply that there will be actions there but no any details of actions is illustrated. The reason is that the referred i236 experiences is concluded from abstract thoughts of several i236 systems but not from one specific system, meanwhile the use of data from


any on-going i236 system is limited under its project contract with intellectual property concerns. For enhancing the possible next study, it’s an option to confer with an i236 system team, via the help of i236 PO’s coordination, to request for a real practice which will be excellent to further manifest the feasibilities and performance of the SLIP framework with an AAT of detailed actions is included.

(7) Is SLIP good enough for innovation engineering? Chapter 3 points out three essentials, Principle, Process, and Signpost, of constructing a systematic Living Lab operation. Nevertheless only two of them, Principle and Process, are worked together in the proposed SLIP, the concept of Signpost which can advance the flexibility of process handling as well as optimize the working schedules is not applied. Lack of adopting Signpost makes the SLIP not well enough, so that to combine all these three essentials to build a better framework is a potential study in the further.

6. CONSLUSION AND FUTURE

WORKS This paper sketches and introduces a novel

Living Lab framework called SLIP capable of promoting industrial profits of from designing smart living trail systems to commercializing smart living services. The proposed SLIP scheme consisting of 6 components shows its capabilities via an operation instance with leveraging ENoLL-HC and a 6-stage Living Lab process. By means of the P4P operation, the SLIP framework provides a systematic approach which is useful for not only enhancing the industrial performance of smart living services but also advancing Living Lab researches.

Next, more issues which may merit further investigations are highlighted as the followings:

(1) How to advance the use of User Experience Feedback? User Experience Feedback is one of the core concepts on Living Lab designs [26, 33] and has become a research challenge especially towards real-time user involvement. How to achieve real-time User Experience Feedback with the use of ICT technology and how to transform the results of User Experience Feedback to improve the planned service are worthy of further studying.

(2) What ICT Technologies could be used to assist the Living Lab developments? Since Living Lab is an ICT-based innovation ecosystem, the use of ICT technology affects the application and development directions of Living Lab. Although ENoLL announced a Living Lab Roadmap including its valuable 4-levels processing architecture and

ENoLL-HC, it lacks of a development roadmap of ICT for Living Lab. Hence, using technology foresight approaches to discover ICT development roadmap for Living Lab is significantly becoming an interesting topic.

(3) How to extend the proposed research achievements further to contribute to Living Lab research communities? There are plenty of Living Lab research communities like ENoLL making great efforts in promoting their study results on Living Lab. ENoLL has successfully broadened the impact of Living Lab by reason of its openness with other Living Lab research and industrial parties. According to ENoLL’s recent internal review board, the Knowledge Management (KM) is selected as the propriety issue for improving Living Lab experience sharing. On a normal basis, KM will play a critical role of abstracting, processing and extending this Living Lab research achievements. However, how to do KM for Living Lab is a grant challenge since in general a Living Lab is a complex ecosystem composed of social, economical, technological, environmental, cultural and political elements.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The author thanks Dr. Jenn-Hwan Tarng, the Director of i236 Promotion Office, for his contribution during the development of various ideas and concepts presented in this paper.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Yu-Tso Chen is an Assistant Professor of Department of Information Management, National United University, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. degree from Institute of Information Management, National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan, and his M.S. degree from Department of Information Management, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Taiwan. His research interests include Service Science & Management Engineering, Information Security, Communications Networks, and Technology Foresight. (Received June 2010, revised September 2010, accepted October 2010)


以 Living Lab Harmonization Cube 勾勒智慧生活服務產業推動架構

陳宇佐

國立聯合大學資訊管理學系苗栗市恭敬里聯大 1 號

摘要

近幾年來，具前瞻眼光的國家多高度重視智慧生活服務的發展與產業推動，期望能藉

以提昇人民的生活品質及開創新的商業機會以謀得經濟成長。生活實驗室（Living Lab）是一種以人為中心思考的新興的服務工程與商務創新方法，目前，生活實驗室

的創新原則模型是最被普遍研究的項目之一，然而，如何以生活實驗室方法來協助服

務產業的推動卻鮮少被討論。有鑑於此，本文提出一套智慧生活服務產業推動（Smart Living Industry Promotion, SLIP）架構並輔以一個P4P架構操作的實施說明案例，此

SLIP架構有助於提昇從設計智慧生活試驗系統到完成智慧生活服務商品化的產業效

益，而文中的SLIP操作係以ENoLL Living Lab Harmonization Cube創新原則運作在一

個六階段的流程為案例說明。透過P4P的操作，本研究的SLIP智慧生活服務產業推動

架構不僅是一套有利於促進智慧生活服務之產業效益的系統化方法，也是值得作為催

化生活實驗室相關研究的參考模型。

關鍵詞：生活實驗室、Harmonization Cube、商務創新、智慧生活、產業推動（*聯絡人：[email protected]）

Documents

SKETCH INDUSTRY PROMOTION FRAMEWORK FOR SMART …€¦ · SKETCH INDUSTRY PROMOTION FRAMEWORK FOR SMART LIVING SERVICES BY LEVERAGING LIVI NG LAB HARMONIZATION CUBE . Yu-Tso Chen