A National Digital Living Laboratory for Wales

Imagine being able to look at some of the problems your business is trying to find solutions for in a way that lets you test your ideas thoroughly before going to market.

Imagine doing that whilst also working closely with some potential customers in an environment that allows you to work together to develop and test solutions. 

Imagine being able to develop and model test scenarios to refine your ideas and then readily see the impact of your changes.

Imagine being able to de-risk your development and get to market faster. 

A National Digital Living Laboratory for Wales would let you do all that in a real-life test and experimentation environment where real-world problem owners (authorities, agencies etc) and potential problem solvers (businesses, academics etc) can work together to create innovative solutions to their problems.

Our facilities at the National Living Laboratory have been developed to replicate the highly successful models used by the Defence Sector where collaboration and co-creation have proved to be so successful. 

How it Works

A Living Lab employs four main activities:

  • Co-Creation: get problem owners and solution producers to work together to share knowledge in order to create and develop new ideas or solutions
  • Exploration: engage all stakeholders, especially user communities, at the earlier stage of the co-creation process for discovering emerging scenarios, usages and behaviours through live scenarios in real or virtual environments (e.g. virtual realityaugmented realitymixed reality).
  • Experimentation: implement the proper level of technological artefacts to experience live scenarios with a large number of users while collecting data which will be analysed in their context during the evaluation activity
  • Evaluation: assess new ideas and innovative concepts as well as related technological artefacts in real life situations through various dimensions such as socio-ergonomic, socio-cognitive and socio-economic aspects; make observations on the potentiality of a viral adoption of new concepts and related technological artefacts through a confrontation with users’ value models

Benefits

The Living Lab approach to problem solving allows for:

  • Collaborative problem definition
  • Collaborative solution testing
  • Modelling of solution options
  • De-risked solution delivery
  • Systematic germination of solutions, in low-cost environments

De-risking of ideas can take place within the synthetic environment, whilst using as close to real-time, real-world data sets from a wide range of official sources throughout Wales as possible.

Additional Support

You might need some support in this new way of working and The Living Laboratory:

  • Has access to a wide range of expertise that will all assist in the development of the commercialisation of solutions
  • Provides guidance to help you generate clear definition of challenges  
  • Supports the shaping of the co-creation process to generate successful outcomes.
  • Provides process mentoring to develop investor ready proposals based on the concept of “Business Readiness Levels” that ensures ideas are sturdy and worthy of investment.
  • Has access to fast track funding programmes to support innovation and the delivery of new ideas within Wales.
  • Can introduce you to influencers and decision makers, possibly even to new markets also.

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