Opening message

ENOLL CHAIRPERSON FERNANDO VILARIÑO OPENING MESSAGE

ENoLL is putting together all its efforts in order to gather the Community of people supporting the Living Lab movement, in Europe and in the World, around this digital event. Our aim is to provide our community with the state of the art in multi-stakeholder citizen-centric innovation methods, tools, projects and best practices.

This year, due to the tragic events of the Sars-COV-2 pandemic, and also due to the impossibility of gathering physically around a common place, the ENoLL Office made a fantastic job in setting up the digital version of our Conference and Summer School -as a matter of fact, building up the foundations for a permanent legacy of our digital future.

This is one of the challenges that these terrible times have brought to us: the dynamic adaptation to a digital future for human interactions without losing the core of the ENoLL’s spirit: “Empowering Everyone to Innovate, not Leaving Anyone Behind”. This accelerated digital adaptation can represent a leap forward for our Community and the World in many ways.

One the one hand, we are embedded into a process of deployment of scalable Capacity Building Programs, accessible to everyone though the Internet platforms, which will potentially allow to increase the learning curves for the development of impactful open innovation at a pace not witnessed before.

On the other hand, and in parallel, agile responses from the institutions are requested more and more, day after day, and the evidence of the need for a multi-stakeholder approach to challenge solution is now under no discussion. We have strong evidences of the role that Living Labs can play in fields such as: the development of actual Collaboratory approaches for Social Innovation, the unveiling of the Social Impact of AI, the new roles of Living Labs in Rural Areas, the new paradigms of Health and Well-being going from patient to protagonist, and, of course, the specific implementation of the Green Agenda and Energy Transition.

From water management to mobility design in the smart cities, from new frameworks for food production and consumption to novel approaches for digital social technologies, ENoLL Living Labs are contributing with facts and actions to the construction of a better future in which, together, we are stronger.

The speakers with whom we have shared our panels during DLLD 2020 represent

a sample of what can be done with the right ambition for a positive transformative effect of impactful innovation. The organisers of the workshops provided us with pointers and tools to “how” this positive impact can be achieved in our specific fields of work.

The submitted research papers have provided us with the state-of-the-art of the current -and also future- visions, and the Virtual Learning Lab allowed the novel members of our community to develop actual capacities for their professional activity. I also invite you to explore our sessions around the ENoLL Action-Oriented Task Forces, were we gathered our communities of interest around specific topics.

I am proud to share this event with you as a platform for human interaction, connecting people devoted to innovation-led growth and positive social transformation, the objectives shared in the Manifesto for Innovation in Europe.

Fernando Vilariño Chairperson of ENoLL, Associate Director at Computer Vision Centre and Associate Professor at UAB. Co-Founder of the Library Living Lab