Balancing the Role of the Researcher in a Public Administration Living lab

Living labs facilitate studying ongoing innovation in co-creation with users and with involvement of public and private stakeholders. While originally developed for studying ICTs, living labs have known a growing popularity in... [ view full abstract ]

Living labs facilitate studying ongoing innovation in co-creation with users and with involvement of public and private stakeholders. While originally developed for studying ICTs, living labs have known a growing popularity in social sciences (Følstadt 2008; Evans & Karvonen 2014; Leminen 2013). When applied for public or social innovation, living labs can be defined as ‘a research and design methodology applied by research institutes in cooperation with public and private partners for developing and testing innovations in co-creation with users in real-life settings’ (cf. Dekker et al. 2017: 15). While living labs are to date only scarcely applied in PA research, applications in social sciences have been focusing on PA-related objects of research including sustainable energy, urban development and healthcare.

This paper studies a living lab in refugee housing and reception. This case of refugee housing uses co-living and co-learning of refugees with people from the neighbourhood to create an inclusive approach to reception and integration. Activities that are developed by various public and private partners in the project, in co-creation with the users (refugees, co-living youth & neighbourhood) should support integration and reception. The project has a time frame of one year.
Based on auto-ethnographic research methods of participant observation and diary study (Ellis 2004), this paper describes and problematizes the ambivalent role of the research partner in the public administration living lab. The research partner is required to independently monitor and evaluate the innovations that are being developed, while at the same time being closely involved with the innovation process. They are part of a long term, intensive and sometimes unpredictable collaboration with many interdependencies between the partners involved. Several complications of the role of researchers are highlighted including pro-innovation bias of living lab projects, navigating various interests of stakeholders in collaboration, acquiring access to research data and acquiring of long-term informed consent for participation of the co-creating individuals involved. The paper outlines how researchers can balance their role in a living lab, by switching roles during different stages of the iterative design process of the living lab.