How to drive innovation in collaborative engineering work and working environments — A living lab approach

While production has seen great productivity improvements, productivity of knowledge work, of which engineering work is one of the most important examples, has seen only limited advances. Engineering specific IT-tools (CAx, PDM) support specific steps of the engineering process, but advances towards more holistic collaborative working environments that support coordination and communication requirements in addition to engineering work have been meagre. I argue that missing absorptive capacity and collaboration between different innovation stakeholders (users, technology providers, and researchers) is a key reason for this. A living lab approach orchestrating different knowledge building, idea generation, and experimentation activities has the potential to drive innovation in this domain. The paper introduces the different methodologies and discusses their practical application in a case example. While the approach is specific to the application in the collaborative engineering and virtual knowledge work domain, it can inform and extend living lab practices more generally.