Apollon Final Report seamless exchange of information between suppliers, subcontractors and consumers. Finally, on the level of innovation itself there is, together with the development of suitable policies, a need for both producers and consumers to address sustainability requirements for the products they are manufacturing and using. Therefore the vertical experiment on eManufacturing clustered three Living Labs within the automotive sector in three different countries. Through the application of an Integration and Service platform that can act as a collaborative platform, this experiment wanted to assess how and to what extent such a platform, through which new services can be developed and evaluated, can address the challenges mentioned above. The eParticipation and Social Media experiment focused on user empowerment, which have always been an important objective for governments. The rise of so-called Web2.0 applications and services has contributed to this objective by significantly lowering the thresholds for users. Also, new types of technologies like 3D media and RFID offer complementary opportunities for citizens to participate in various kinds of (community) activities. But often such eParticipation applications and services are developed for and within a specific, local context. Promoting citizens’ participation to innovative eMedia services on a European scale and at the early phases of the designing process can help existing projects to reach a European audience. But such an approach is challenged by issues concerning interoperability, regulation and contextualization, which need to be addressed. Therefore the objective of the eParticipation and Social Media vertical experiment was to develop a framework, addressing these challenges for integrating different independent Living Lab experiments. The eParticipation and Social Media vertical experiment clustered three running local Living Lab projects in three countries, in which social media are being used to stimulate and facilitate the participation of citizens. The experiment focused on interworking and integration of the fragmented solutions being piloted across Europe. Therefore, the experiment assessed to what extent an integration framework dealing with the issues of interoperability, regulation and contextualization can facilitate cross-border research between different stakeholders as well as to what extent this approach can be used to scale-up existing projects and to explore new markets.
2 Methodology and Tools The first result of the APOLLON vertical and horizontal activities is a set of methods, tools and guidelines enabling sustainable collaboration for research, development, innovation and market development in settings of cross-border living lab networks, including: • Guidelines, methods and tools for collaboration among the partners of a cross border living labs network, addressing the different challenges covered in the domain specific pilot experiments. • A platform for methodology support, offered through the “Knowledge Centre” (http://knowledgecenter.openlivinglabs.eu/). This portal contains a repository of recommended tools, guidelines and practices. We have ensured that this will be continued after the lifetime of APOLLON, through collaboration with the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KIC). The specific cross border aspects of setting up, operating and managing living labs networks and cross border aspects of innovation and market creation arise because of the existence of differences, i.e.: •
Differences in cultures and practices of human and organizational collaboration, and related aspects of decision making, design traditions etc. which affects processes of collaborative innovation and market creation, and collaboration in general, and requires
ICT PSP Project Reporting Template
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Final Version
