PROSEU Living Labs are part of the Living Lab Community

Two representatives of the PROSEU consortium participated in the Open Living Lab Days 2018 and the summer school Learning Lab Day, organised by the European Network of Living Labs in Geneva, Switzerland.

Co-learning, co-creation and co-production of knowledge are some of the aspects that drive our research within the PROSEU project. We believe that promoting an active participation of citizens in energy markets, institutions and decision-making is essential to foster the transition to affordable, clean, low carbon energy in Europe. And to do so in an inclusive and transparent way, a diversity of social actors should be included in the conversation.

Living Labs (“living laboratories”) as environments for exploration, experimentation and evaluation of ideas, projects or products, hold the potential to place together multiple agents to work on a common need or problem to, collectively, co-create a solution that addresses local or community challenges.

The involvement of multiple stakeholders (i.e. civil society, private and public sectors as well as academia) in open innovation processes, contributing to knowledge exchange and collaboration in new and imaginative ways, is one of the methodologies that will be used in PROSEU. In this way, our aim is to set up common spaces for discussion and collaboration where the different actors involved in the energy sector in Europe exchange their visions, expectations, barriers and drivers related to the production and self-consumption of energy from renewable energy sources (RES). At the same time they co-create, together, innovative solutions to mainstream the phenomenon of prosumerism in Europe.

The annual summit of the worldwide Living Lab community “Open Living Lab Days” (OLLD2018), organised by the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) in Geneva, provided an opportunity for learning and exchanging ideas with members of other Living Labs projects on a variety of topics.

Moreover, the two PROSEU partners (from FC.ID) attended the special side-event “Learning Lab Day”, which is the central component of the ENoLL’s Learning Lab programme. This programme focuses on “how to set-up and run a Living Lab”, including theoretical and practical approaches. This event helped us to better understand the potentiality of the Living Lab approach in innovation processes, their different levels of organisations or how participatory tools can boost creativity of a group. Moreover, this event gave us the opportunity to interact with international Living Labs members with long-standing experience in their fields.

For the programme of the Learning Lab Day 2018, click here.

For the programme of the Open Living Lab Days ODD2018, click here.

To see the pictures from the event on Twitter, click here.

Image copyright: Workshop Lego Serious Play: “my living lab” by "Esther Marín"