Exploring the german living lab research infrastructure: Opportunities for sustainable products and services

Living Labs for Sustainable Development aim to generate low-resource innovations in production-consumption systems by integrating users and actors. This chapter presents the results of a German study investigating potentials of and measures towards the realization of a German Living Lab infrastructure to support actor-integrated sustainability research and innovations in Germany Geibler et al. (2014). Generally, as the status quo analysis revealed, the sustainability and Living Lab communities in Germany are hardly intertwined. However, twelve Living Labs that explicitly consider sustainability aspects could be identified. The analyses of drivers and barriers as well as SWOT (Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) provided the foundation to identify options for the promotion of a user-integrating research infrastructure supporting sustainable products and services. The measures suggested for Germany include a funding program for actor-integrated, socio-technical research based on a Living Lab network, a communication campaign, and programs to foster networking and the inclusion of SMEs. Some of the suggested measures have already been taken up.