Internationally recognised Living Lab Handbook helps create business and innovation opportunities in rural areas
The Living Lab Handbook for Small Municipalities sets out the principles of Living Labs and co-creation and offers tools and examples on developing municipalities.
Looking for ideas how to boost business opportunities in rural areas? Living Lab Handbook for Small Municipalities – Designing a vibrant countryside of the future provides municipalities with a Living Lab operating model and tools to be used to create opportunities for developing business and innovation. The handbook benefits also anyone with interest in experimenting in real environments, creative and design methods as well as co-creation.
This handbook, published by Laurea University of Applied Sciences, was created as a part of Lyckan – A futurehub for inspiration and rural innovations project during 2021-2023. The Living Lab operating model presented in the handbook helps to build a Living Lab – a real development environment that promotes creativity and diverse learning in ecosystems. It generates practice-based innovations and supports rapid experimentation of ideas and prototypes. In this handbook, you’ll find concrete tools and examples derived from the Lyckan project on how to co-create and develop services innovatively in rural areas – and the methods can be applied elsewhere as well.
The handbook offers guidance on utilising future-oriented and foresight methods, promoting circular bioeconomy, productising rural tourism assets, and bringing creative arts to local businesses. You get to know tools such as Futures Triangle, Bioinnovation Sprint, Steps of Pilot, Business Artist concept and much more. Operating a Living Lab will connect entrepreneurs, enable co-creating new business ideas together and boost the activities in the region.
This in an open access publication provided by Laurea University of Applied Sciences. It has received international interest and was recognised by Institute for the Future (IFTF) and featured in their newsletter. Also, a more extensive Finnish version of the handbook is available. Alltogether, these two publications have been downloaded more than 1400 times.
Interested in Living Lab cooperation? Get to know Laurea’s Living Labs on Laurea’s website.
The Lyckan project was implemented in cooperation between the municipality of Lapinjärvi (Finland), Laurea, Haaga-Helia, Häme, and LAB Universities of Applied Sciences. The project received funding from the European Regional Development Fund through the Regional Council of Uusimaa.