What is Consumer Contributed Product Innovation

The concept of “Living Labs” in general is not completely new in R&D. Available publications focused on local requirements and targeted on business specific needs. In this chapter available ICT for use in a Living Lab are assessed and an implementation roadmap on behalf of ICT is presented. Besides buzzwords like Web 2.0 and Triple Play, ICT enables fast and substantial advancements. To bring a clear view into the range of solutions the authors orient on an ICT layering-architecture and the client/server nature of today’s Web-technology. The roadmap takes into account currently applicable technologies and likely future trends. Technological maturity, social compliance, consumer acceptance and politics & marketregulation are considered in the critique. The breakdown shows that a few core technologies are not only sufficient for the skeletal structure, but also from the main bulk of a Living Lab infrastructure. Thus the technology for most of the desirable features of a Living Lab is on-hand, future functional extensions can be provided by open interfaces and a modular architecture of the system.